The Infinite Ocean

A hacker prowling around different secured areas and accessing encrypted memory banks in the atmospheric confines of a space station, gradually getting up to speed with the rich backstory from the log entries of disappeared crew members recounting the ongoing development of an uncooperative military artificial intelligence (the ASD Project of the SGDS - Sentient Global Defense System)... playing this game, you could be forgiven for mistakenly believing you were in a missing chapter from the System Shock series.

Unlike its spiritual predecessors, however, this game features no combat or RPG elements -- instead it is a game of narrative exploration from the perspective of a Mystian 1st-person adventurer. As the player learns more about Dr. Leonard Eaves' principled opposition to the Crusade Project, storywise it also delivers a more philosophical and nuanced take on the hackneyed dark-SF subject matter, perhaps closer to the work of interactive fiction A Mind Forever Voyaging.

It is more than a little mysterious. Where exactly is everybody, exactly? And what role does the player occupy in this allegorical setting, precisely? The game isn't going to spell it out for you; instead, between rummaging through refuse for passwords and 23-bit encryption keys, it'll make you reflect a bit on the true nature of intelligence and consciousness.