Suspended

Suspended (English for hinged, latched ) is a science fiction text adventure from Infocom from the year 1983.

Action

The player is in an artificially induced, regularly 500 years lasting deep sleep. It is located in a facility under the surface of the planet populated by humans Contra. About his consciousness, he is connected with the vital systems and infrastructure of the planet. Controlling the systems such as the movement of persons or the weather is normally done automatically, and the controlling person is awakened by the system only in case of emergency. Such distress is present at the beginning of the game play, and the player wakes up. The control station in which it is located, was heavily damaged by the earthquake. The inhabitants of the planet go for lack of knowledge of the earthquake assume that the controlling entity (the player ) has lost his mind and tried to destroy the planet. A player's task is to repair the surrounding him means before an emitted by the Earth delegation arrives that has the mission to kill him.

Gameplay and technology

Suspended is a text adventure, that is, there is no graphic elements. Environment and events are made and the actions of the player entered as on-screen text also as text using the keyboard. The parser of Suspended understands about 700 words, about as many as the parser of Zork ruled.

The game was waiting time for publication on a narrative innovation: The player is not himself since he is fixed within the surrounding facility. Rather, it controls six distributed in the facility robots, all of which have different special abilities. The use and combination of these robots and their special abilities the game objective must be achieved. The robots are:

As side dishes ( " Feelies " ) contained the early releases of Suspended a map of the facility and six rubber chips for the six robots so that they could adjust their current whereabouts on the map. As the game refrained from naming space available outputs, this card set is in fact a copy, as they kept an overview of what is happening with her. Furthermore, were some documents that should illustrate the backstory settled.

Reception

Suspended received by the press almost continuously positive reviews. Appreciation was expressed, inter alia, the parser, the loving character design of the six robot and the built-in help system. There was criticism that the lack of basic functions (vision, grasping ) provide some robots for frustrating moments.