A Suitable Watchmen Reference

Rorschach is a lovely little conversational adventure game, with some fantastic scribbled-in-felt-tip visuals.

It's been developed as freeware by one of the programmers from Chronicles Of Riddick studio, Starbreeze. Said programmer, Jens Andersson, explains that "I've been experimenting with a new way to have conversations with non-player characters. The idea is to allow the player to pick up and carry conversation-topics between characters in the game. If a non-player character mentions something new, the player can pickup that topic and carry it to another character to ask him about it. By limiting the number of topics the player can carry, you force the player to decide which topics are worth keeping, instead of just asking about everything as you do in many games. This creates some interesting possibilities where information almost becomes an item that can be used for puzzles and trade."

As it turns out, the results are pretty good. The conversation topic inventory is an idea that I expect to see stolen all over the place in games to come. You'll want to play this one. There's a direct link to the 14mb (the size of around one Peggle) download just here.