Suspended

This text adventure (one of Techtite's choices for Top 50 Multimedia Classics) involved your character waking up from cryogenic sleep, after being buried deep within an alien world. A major earthquake has disrupted the systems of the underground habitat you're a part of, and these must be repaired to save the lives of the inhabitants on the surface. This must be accomplished via six robots, each of which perceives the world around them completely differently (imagine monkeys, each of which can see no evil, hear no evil, or speak no evil, and you can see a small piece of the bigger puzzle here). Saving the surface inhabitants, however, is only half the problems solved. This game even had an option to change the story, if you wished. Such game concepts made this game praised by many, including TIME and Rolling Stone. To top it all off, the original box for this game was a full sized, 3D plastic face, depicting the cryogenic capsule's mask.

It might be best not to think of Suspended as a work of Interactive Fiction at all. It is a pseudo-simulation game, written before software technology was developed enough to develop real simulation games. It is a game for frustrated would-be air traffic controllers who enjoy coordinating multiple activities from a central location, much more than it is a work of fiction. It is a game for people who like to play WITH games, not merely play them.

This is a very different adventure from many others by Infocom because, unlike other games, where you may manipulate objects yourself, in Suspended, you must reply on robots to do the job for you.