Innocent Until Caught

Year 1993, me sitting at my 486, and instead of being chased by a teacher over an unpaid school travel pass, I'm being hunted by a galactic tax authority. Innocent Until Caught from Divide by Zero arrived at a time when adventure games still weren't sure if they should be serious like Gabriel Knight or half-baked like a dozen of their clones. This one chose a third path.

You play as Jack Ladd, a cosmic con artist and tax dodger, being pursued by an intergalactic collection agency. The setting is sci-fi with a twist — the universe as a dirty, cynical place full of shady characters, neon bars, and bureaucratic institutions that'll get you before any space pirate ever would. The tone sits somewhere between The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and a B-movie cosmic noir comedy. Nobody's shooting at galactic empires here; they're just dealing with debts.

Mechanically, it's a classic point-and-click adventure in the LucasArts tradition, but without LucasArts' polish. Inventory, item combining, dialogue — all present and accounted for. Except the puzzles sometimes slide into logic that only makes sense to the developers. I got stuck a few times not because it was interestingly challenging, but because the game simply didn't provide enough clues. And yes, back in 1993, you couldn't just call a hint line if you lived in Czechia.

What I remember and what the game does well is atmosphere. The world feels lived-in and pleasantly scruffy in just the right way. Jack Ladd is a likeable scoundrel you can easily relate to, whether you're thirty, debt-ridden, or forty. The humor works when it's not trying too hard. The graphics were solid for the time, the music fits, and the voice acting... it exists in the original version and is passable. The game aged honestly: the interface is sluggish, pixel hunting rears its head now and then, but the core holds up.

Today Innocent Until Caught will mostly appeal to adventure fans from the nineties who know the LucasArts catalogue backwards and are looking for what comes next. It's not Sierra, it's not LucasArts, but it's a solid piece from that same era that deserves more than dusty obscurity. It runs without a hitch in the browser via DOSBox Online, and an hour spent with Jack Ladd is an hour when you don't have to think about your own tax situation.