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Gadget: Past as Future

I recently viewed a playthrough of this game while looking for screenshots for Chrissie’s Picture Show quiz.  It’s a rather eerie and surreal first person slide-show style adventure.  A comet is supposedly heading for Earth, but some of the people you talk to deny it completely and some (the scientists) are making secret plans to leave the planet completely.  In the beginning, you travel back and forth to various destinations by train, talking to everyone aboard and at each stop to try to find the head scientist named Horselover.  When you do, you are given instructions to find certain items and complete certain tasks, but much of the action, such as flying an airplane, operating strange machinery, and driving a monorail, is done automatically through cut scenes.  The characters in the game are all a bit bizzare in appearance, and all conversations are written dialogue.  The game is very light on puzzle solving, but the ending has some interesting twists that left me guessing about events.  Since I own the game, I will play it through at my own pace to see if there is anything I missed by just watching.

I forgot to mention that there is a narrator’s voice which you hear a few times in the game, and the music often has a dissonant, machine-like quality.  The places you visit are usually quite sterile looking with very few people, and the train conductor is eerily the same no matter what train you’re boarding.  This, along with some sinister government characters, gives the game a bit of a creepy aura.