Technobabylon - Review & Interview @ TechRaptor

Cyberpunk comes back. Don Parsons from TechRaptor reviewed the excellent Point&Click Adventure Technobabylon. A snippet:

I’ve taken my time getting to gameplay because there isn’t a ton to talk about here. It is mostly traditional point and click adventure game play with some time sensitive events (not traditional QTEs as you can just wait and try again for the right pattern spot). The puzzles in Technobabylon are a breath of fresh air. They are challenging at times but logical in almost all instances. There were one or two that had me feeling it stretched logic some, but by and large the puzzles in this game were of very good design, logically proceeding from the story and fitting into it, rather than puzzles for puzzles sake, or puzzles that make no sense. A lot of the puzzles even have multiple solutions to them, which also helps mitigate a  traditional adventure puzzle flaw where if you aren’t thinking exactly the same way as the developer, you can’t solve it.

The inventory interface is clean and works well, and in more modern traditions it gets rid of items that you won’t need for future puzzles. That makes it easier to know what your options are, which means that even if you get stuck, you can probably eventually brute force your way through the situation. The game wouldn’t hurt with a bit more feedback at times during puzzles, but it does pretty well most of the time with the world around you having hints on occasion.

He interviewed developer James Dearden, too:

TechRaptor: Technobabylon was originally released as freeware, what was the hope in revisiting and updating it to release as a commercial product?

James: Way back in 2010, I’d started making Technobabylon as a practice attempt at making adventure games. Before that, all I’d done were a couple of simple puzzle and strategy games, and I wanted to get better before tackling a longer narrative. However, Technobabylon turned out to be more popular than I’d expected, so as the narrative grew, I thought it might benefit from being all together as one large project, rather than a series of episodes with sharp quality changes.

I’d seen the success that other commercial projects like Gemini Rue had had with Wadjet Eye, so I thought it’d be worth a chance by showing Dave the demo at AdventureX in 2012. Apparently my pitch succeeded, so this is my opportunity to turn indie games into something more than just a hobby for me!

There's a demo on Steam to test the game.