I've played games since I was a kid and the Infocom games were among my favorites. While games with words only might seem quaint compared to the graphic-intensive ones today, they were more than made up for it with good writing and challenging puzzles. Infocom issued a wide variety of story types in its games, ranging from you playing a wizard to a treasure-hunting adventurer. Out of all the Infocom games I've played, though, Suspended was unique. In many ways, I found it to be the most original and challenging of them all.
What sets Suspended apart is that you do not directly act on anything yourself. You are a guardian of sorts, sealed in an underground complex on a world in which technology controls such things as the weather to make it a paradise of sorts. You are charged with maintaining the peaceful, plentiful life for the rest of your society above. Of course, something goes wrong and the various systems begin to malfunction and you are awoken from your slumber to fix things and this is where it gets interesting because you have to work using a series of robots.
In this game, you do not go out and do things yourself. Instead, you have to use a group of robots to be your eyes, ears,
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and hands. Each robot serves a different function. One robot for instance has the audio abilities to hear like a human in order to interact with people and another robot sports multiple appendages and is the primary maintenance bot. The really tricky part is that each robot views the things around it in a different way. One robot has the visual abilities of a human, but the others vary. For example, there is a electronic socket in a room that you might need to use. The visual robot might describe it has a blue socket, while another robot might describe it as a round object with several bumps on it. Of the different robots, the robot called Poet is the most amusing. When asked to look at something, Poet spouts off a series of poetic words or phrases instead of giving a dry description. While these varying descriptions may sound confusing, taken together, they often allow you to figure out the purpose of the object and, in some cases, you need to have more than one robot describe it in order to determine its function.
With its original concept of having to work through robots, the varying ways to figuring out objects, and the technological nature of the puzzles you have to solve, Suspended offers a truly unique experience to any fan of the Infocom games.
