Void: Corporation

Void: Corporation is a text game from 2000, and it is only fair to say so in the first sentence, because anyone expecting pictures will be baffled within seconds. Nothing is drawn here. You read a description of a place and type what you want to do, exactly as in the adventures of the early eighties.

It was written in the Adventure Game Toolkit, a system already well past its prime by 2000, and entered in the annual amateur interactive fiction competition, where it finished in the bottom third of the field. That placing describes it fairly accurately.

The setting is cyberpunk, but home-grown cyberpunk: it grows out of a world the author invented as a boy for his own tabletop campaigns, and that shows in a good way. You play Dan Clayman, working your way through an enemy stronghold. Your tools are software cubes, slabs and pills, each with a different function, and a fair share of the puzzles rest on working out which one to reach for. This is where the game is at its most interesting, because the world has a logic of its own and years of invention behind it.

The execution is weak and there is no dressing that up. The parser understands only some phrasings, so you spend a lot of time arguing about vocabulary rather than about solutions. Exits are not always listed, which means wandering rooms that hold nothing. Combat answers with the same sentence every time. The game is also short and easy, so it never really gets going.

Recommend it to a narrow group: people who enjoy amateur interactive fiction, flaws included, and want to see an interesting world in an unfinished wrapper. Everyone else should start somewhere more polished.

On oldgame.cz it runs straight in the browser, with nothing to install.