BioSys
 | Jumpstart |
| PC |
That most maligned of genres, the point-and-click adventure, has only been saved from the ignominy of gamers’ scorn by coming up with two of the most popular games ever, Myst and its sequel, Riven.
These two puzzle-based stories are anathema to today’s hardcore players. They are not 3D. They are not real-time war strategies. They don’t even move: you click on the screen in the direction you want to go, and then the image just pops you over there.
Imagine their horror! A life spent drooling over tessellated pixels, mip-mapping and multi-pass texturing, and all of a sudden the whole world is going mad for a bunch of pretty bitmaps.
What the polygon-heads forgot was that a good game is all about atmosphere, which Myst and particularly Riven have in spades (if you can actually have atmosphere in spades). They created worlds that no amount of z-buffering could equal, simply through beautiful imagery and extraordinary sounds.
BioSys, from JumpStart Solutions, is firmly in the Riven mould, although when I suggested this to Rob Agar, one of the game’s programmers, he was aghast. "Riven is just a series of unrelated puzzles," he averred, whereas BioSys is so much more.
Indeed, it is. Although the game owes much, in both format and storyline, to the Riven dynasty, it is not a series of random puzzles. You wake up in a rainforest that, it soon becomes clear, is actually part of a biosphere. It is raining, there are only a couple of paths open to you and you’re hot.
Unlike Riven, progress is not determined by the solving of brainteasers, except for a single, rather metaphysical one: why are you here? As you move around, you’ll notice that there are environmental controls spread around the area. These allow you to change temperature, rain, wind and mist.
You see, BioSys is as much a simulation as it is an adventure game. Well, not AS much: finding a solution to the original problem – what has gone wrong with the biosphere and what you can do about it – is paramount. But you can monitor and finely control many aspects of the environment. Or five environments to be exact.
For example, the first thing that you must do to progress through the rainforest is drain off a flooded pass. The only way to do this is to find the rain switch and turn it off. (Wouldn’t that be a nice switch to find?)
You also have to control the internal environment, yourself. You need to eat, rest, drink. And you need to avoid certain foods and keep a balanced diet. You monitor all of this via a keystroke – constantly - so you can quickly see how you feel, as you travel around unravelling the puzzle.
In the end, though, does this BioSys have the atmosphere to sustain life? It certainly makes more sense than Riven, and is definitely intriguing, but it doesn’t quite have the eerie mystery of the latter. Nevertheless, it’s a great place to live for a few days.