OOOOOOOOoooooo this is a good thread.

Ok ok ok I wanna talk about a game called Sentient by Psygnosis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentient_(video_game)

This game is a first person RPG set on a mining space station that is headed towards disaster. I plays out in realtime and the events that occur are determined by your actions on the station.

What does this mean? Well if you do nothing the station will meet disaster. You can do whatever you want, but you might want to try and stop that.

Dialog with other station members plays out like this:

You can change your mood/manner of speaking (scale ranging from angry/aggressive to overly friendly), and everything will have different effects. How others see you is important. How others feel about you is important.

If you want you could also just fuck around with the wrong console and turn off Oxygen on the station.

It’s neat.

Demo playthrough is basically spoiler free because they made a completely standalone scenario for the demo that is fully playable separate to the timeline that occurs in the actual game: https://youtu.be/rT_rbTj3weI?list=PL6dKSOjinJucRoEwU7y_dXWVNb1kS0G6d&t=33

What I like about this concept is that there’s so much you can do with it. You could write stories that have whole butterfly effects based on how the player delayed the presence of one crew member at one specific event that happens later on or something like that. Just because the player took too long talking to someone and delayed their start to work or whatever. Or you could have events that kill various crewmembers essential to the operation of a station and the player’s choice of delaying someone being at that even might then have knockon effects for who has what skills available for a later event. Etc etc. The kind of writing you could do with this kind of “story plays out in realtime” game has always really fascinated me.

ALSO it’s really obviously influenced by Star Trek so there’s that.