Become an astro-detective in 2000:1 A Space Felony
Pinkish purplish liquid
Cheapos among you may remember first-person crime caper Disorient on the Murder Express, in which you play an aging detective with a dedicated “sip whiskey” button. It was one of our best free games of 2016. The team behind it – National Insecurities – have been working on a follow-up. A longer detective story set on board a spinning space station full of corpses where the only remaining witness is a suspicious AI. 2000:1 A Space Felony Or How I Came To Value My Life And Murder Mercilessly [Itch.io page] is coming out on Friday as part of Humble’s monthly bundle deal. You can see what it looks like in the trailer below. But in short: it has a dedicated “sip coffee” button.
Swish trailer. It’s described as a “murder mystery courtroom drama set aboard the USS Endowment, an interplanetary Spacecraft that lost communication with Earth”. You are tasked with clambering aboard, floating around in zero-gravity, taking photographs of the crime scene and showing these photos to MAL, the ship’s computer. Then you conduct a cross-examination which exploits his need to tell the truth when confronted with logical contradiction in his own testimony. Basically, catch the robot lying and he’ll spill the spacebeans.
I’ve had a go and it really amps up Disorient’s purposefully verbose nonsense, making fun of both detective fiction and sci-fi along the way. Every time you take a snap of a significant clue a narrator explains what you found, slowly becoming more and more expert and pointing out the obvious. At one point you take a photo of a simple manual emergency lever and the narrator takes the time to explain the words “manual”, “emergency” and “lever” independently, breaking everything down for you in the most ridiculous, self-conscious way. It’s fun.
It’s coming out as part of Humble Monthly, the subscription-based bundle that nets you a bunch of games for about $12 every month. It’s usually a mix of big stuff, little stuff, and “originals” (stuff that hasn’t been released before, like in the case of 2000:1). It’s generally a decent deal, if you don’t already own everything. Previous headliners include Alien Isolation, Stellaris and (for the next two days, at least) Dark Souls II. But never mind them. I just wanted to show you some silly space station antics.