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Steam Tip: Wadjet Eye's Technobabylon lets you chat up your electronics to solve puzzles

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Steam Tip: Wadjet Eye's Technobabylon lets you chat up your electronics to solve puzzles
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Wadjet Eye - the developer and publisher of all those deliberately lo-fi point and click adventures you see on Steam - is no stranger to imaginative ideas.

Gemini Rue was a mix of sci-fi and film noir, the Blackwell games have you talking to ghosts, Resonance is all about short and long term memory, and Shivah is possibly the world's best game about Rabbinical fist fights.

Its next game, Technobabylon, is perhaps its most heady concoction yet. It's a bold science fiction adventure filled with genetic engineering, virtual realities, and all-seeing secret police.

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One of the three characters, Latha, can meditate to slip into a digital trance and then chat with the virtual avatars that represent nearby electronics. Her grim food dispenser turns into a chatty anime chef, and her security system is a stalwart knight.

You end up with this weird, brain-bending system where you can talk your way past electronics and persuade them to do your bidding. Very clever, very imaginative. Exactly the sort of stuff we expect from this publisher.

You should also expect pixelated art by Ben Chandler that looks like it came straight out of 1994. But that also comes with a pixelated font that you need to squint to read, especially if it's being blown up on a big monitor.

Luckily, most of the text is read out with fantastic voice acting.

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It's a huge game and I've only scratched the surface of it, but Wadjet Eye has a good track record of picking up indie adventures (this time, from James Dearden) and polishing them to a fine sheen. I can't wait to play more.

You should check out the free demo of Technobabylon here to get a feel for it. The full game will hit Windows on May 21st, and will cost $14.99. A mobile port should appear one day, too.

Mark Brown
Mark Brown
Mark Brown is editor at large of Pocket Gamer