Credit:
Inkle
If you’re not prepared to sit and stare at a screen like this for hours, you should stop reading now.
Credit:
Inkle
Although the catalog includes brief excerpts from each uncovered work, it’s the extra annotations later researchers add that give each title its full context. You’ll wind up combing those research notes for evidence of other authors and their timelines. Spotting particular names and dates points you toward the codes and titles required to access additional reference pages on the computer, dragging you further down the rabbit hole. Think of something like Her Story, only swap the cinéma vérité surveillance clips for a library card catalog.
Bit by bit you begin to untangle how the game world’s many writers affect one another through their overlapping works. The treatises, novels, pamphlets, and journals in this database are full of academic sparring, intellectual maneuvering, and social cross-pollination across generations. It all revolves around a long-running quest for a metaphysical key to life itself, which most authors approach but never quite comprehend fully.
Credit:
Inkle
Linking titles to reference codes is the most “gamey” element of the experience.
Credit:
Inkle
As you delve deeper, you also uncover more about the private lives of the researchers who assembled the reference collection and about the loosely defined temporal functions of the computer’s information-synthesis engine you’ve all worked on. Sooner or later you’ll discover core commands that can reveal hidden parts of the computer or modify the sprawling research database itself, which proves essential to reaching your ultimate goal.
Running alongside this is a slowly revealed secondary storyline featuring Liam, the unseen voice that steers you through the research. Via occasional voice clips, Liam hints at a potent, rapidly approaching threat that will try to obstruct your progress by any means, injecting some dramatic tension into your academic investigations.
