Technobabylon (2015)
Technobabylon is a 2015 point-and-click video game made by Technocrat Games and Wadjet Eye Games.
The city of Newton in 2087 runs on Trance, a neural network people plug into rather than face the world outside. An AI called ZOEA monitors everything. Three characters move through this: a Trance-addicted woman who rarely leaves her apartment, a government security agent, and a geneticist whose past is catching up with him. Technobabylon is a point-and-click cyberpunk game with the bones of a police procedural, built on the Gemini Rue engine and equally interested in the ethics of surveillance as in its conspiracy plot.
Quick answers
What is Technobabylon about?
The city of Newton in 2087 runs on Trance, a neural network people plug into rather than face the world outside. An AI called ZOEA monitors everything. Three characters move through this: a Trance-addicted woman who rarely leaves her apartment, a government security agent, and a geneticist whose past is catching up with him. Technobabylon is a point-and-click cyberpunk game with the bones of a police procedural, built on the Gemini Rue engine and equally interested in the ethics of surveillance as in its conspiracy plot.
When was Technobabylon released?
Technobabylon was released on 21 May 2015.
Who made Technobabylon?
Technobabylon was made by Technocrat Games and Wadjet Eye Games.
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Technobabylon in our writing
- Companion guide: Wadjet Eye Games: The Studio That Kept the Adventure Alive
A few thoughts on Technobabylon
For the AI-consciousness thread, Martha Wells's Artificial Condition (Murderbot Diaries) covers the same territory in prose form: a constructed being questioning what it owes the systems that made it. Zone 414 is a closer genre match visually, a film-noir investigator in a city of synthetic humans.
Cyberpunk worlds run by an AI that knows you better than you do
Technobabylon's Newton runs on Trance, a network the AI ZOEA monitors down to the thought. Artificial Condition follows its own surveillance-haunted AI narrator, Zone 414 sends a detective into a city built and watched by artificial minds, Ghost in the Shell trades in the same hacked-brain paranoia, Half-Life 2 shows a city under alien occupation, and Portal 2 traps its hero in a facility run by a watchful mind.
Mysteries solved by watching closer than everyone else
Technobabylon plays like a detective story wrapped in cyberpunk conspiracy, three characters piecing together clues ZOEA would rather keep hidden. The Complete Sherlock Holmes built the template for deduction as entertainment, Death Note pits a hidden genius against an investigator always a step behind, The Mentalist solves cases by reading people better than any file, and NCIS assembles the truth one overlooked detail at a time.