Editor’s Notebook: ‘Dead Cyborg’ A Free To Play Sci-Fi Adventure

A few weeks ago, I stumbled across Dead Cyborg , a first-person sci-fi adventure game that it’s developer, Endre “Endi” Barath, has released for free.

, a first-person sci-fi adventure game that it’s developer, Endre “Endi” Barath, has released for free. The game is episodic, and the story is told in three episodes, two of which have already been released. Barath urges players who enjoy Dead Cyborg to donate to support the series and keep the project afloat. If not enough is raised from the release of episode two, Dead Cyborg may not be completed with a third episode. This would be a shame because, from my experience with the first episode, the story is very interesting, and explores concepts that really make players stop and think.

“If the donations [do not] hit the goal this year, we are going to invest the money in our next game,” Barath says on Dead Cyborg’s Facebook page.

But according to a graphposted on the Dead Cyborg website, $2,900 of the set goal of $3,000 has been made from episode 2. While that won’t break any Kickstarter records, that’s still a good amount of money collected for a game which costs absolutely nothing to play and was developed using the free-to-use Blender engine. Barath is a one man development team, too, (he did all the coding, art, story writing, and designing the game’s various levels, on his own) so all of the money is going directly into his pocket.

I finished playing through the first episode, earlier tonight, and I must say, Dead Cyborg is a slow-paced game, —but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The game is essentially a very visual science fiction text adventure. While Dead Cyborg is a surprisingly nice looking game for being developed by one person and released for free, the main attraction of Dead Cyborg is not flashy visuals, but the story which is simplistically told through holocubes scattered throughout the levels. See a holocube, walk over to it, activate it, and read the message. That is how the entire story is presented. The rusty, dilapidated environments serve as a means of explaining that the holocubes have been sitting there for a long time. A long, long, time. And something horrible has happened in the meantime.

Dead Cyborg starts in a rather cliche manner: the protagonist wakes up from some sort of hibernation, doesn’t remember a thing, and is the only human left around. Luckily for the protagonist, the previous inhabitants of wherever-he/she-is left holocubes containing notes, laying about. From that point on it is up to players to piece together exactly what happened and solve various environmental puzzles to progress through the game.

Do not let the music in the trailer fool you, you won’t hear anything like that within the game. Everything heard in Dead Cyborg is rooted in the environment. The hum of idling computer systems, the crackling of broken electrical wiring, and the whirring of large machinery still fully operational thanks to the slowly corroding worker drones still dutifully going about their duties WALL-E-like. The comparisons to a children’s animated feature film ends when you come across the first mutilated body, though.

Without ruining much of the story, the game presents players with robots asking questions that robots normally don’t ask. As far as episode one goes (I will probably start into episode two later this week), it’s only speculation at this point, but there were a number of times where I activated a holocube and found an entry like: “I think I have a soul. I don’t know why everyone assumes robots have no soul,” or, “Can robots sin? Pray? If there is a God, humans are not our creators after all.” What happened to the humans that triggered such a thought progression within the robots? Or, more interestingly, what did the robots do to the humans, once they started thinking of such things on there own?

If the anticipation is killing you, head on over to Dead Cyborg’s official websiteand download the two available episodes, completely free (but do remember to donate if you enjoyed the experience!). If you can spare the extra moments, Barath has put Dead Cyborg onto Steam Greenlight, for public judgement, so toss it a vote if you feel Dead Cyborg would be a great addition to the Steam catalog of games. Follow Dead Cyborg on Twitterto keep up with the game’s latest development news.

Too Long; Didn’t Read: Dead Cyborg is a slow-paced sci-fi adventure game that is donation-funded. It looks good, sounds great, and sports an interesting story about robots questioning their existence following the mysterious annihilation of humans, of which you are the sole survivor.