Sentient

There’s this old game called Sentient I used to play that was… not bad, not good, just ahead of its time really. You played as a medic aboard a space station that’s generally going to shit - there’s a disease outbreak, the captain’s been murdered, and you’re dangerously close to crashing into the sun - welcome aboard!

You walked around the station in first person, but interacting and talking to characters was done through the old text adventure system - Talk to [character] about [subject], Pick up [object], Examine [environment], and so forth. You could also change your character’s facial expression to change how they delivered each line - smiling when asking someone to give you an item would be a polite question, frowning would be barking an order. It had no actual effect on the gameplay, and I only ever used it when the generic straight-faced dialogue for the character got repetitive. The game was also open world, or an early attempt at it - you were free to roam the station as you wished (though there were no sidequests in the modern sense) and there was usually more than one way to complete each leg of the branching, multiple-ended story (but only one would be practical).

Like I said, it wasn’t bad. But it was an absolute pain in the ass to play. One of the main realism points the devs had was that most things in the station happened in real time, and characters would follow their own routines moving around the station. The problem with this was that there was no in game clock, map, or any other method to keep track of the time or what point of their routine characters would be at. Several of the missions in the early game are fetch quests - which would be a lot simpler if you didn’t need to find both the person to give you the item, and the person to take it to. There’s a slight relief in the fact that you can ask other characters you came across if they knew where [character you want] is, and if they do you can ask them to walk you there. But even this is flawed - since walking takes time, you’d often walk to where they were at a previous point in their routine. When this happens, the character guiding you just shrugs, says they thought [character] would be here, and goes back to their own routine. Back to wandering for you!

Unfortunately, crashing into the sun also happens in real time, and it’s what really bites this game in the ass. For your first dozen or so playthroughs, while you’re wandering around trying to figure out the layout of the station and where each of the key characters can be found (there’s quite a few of them over the course of the game), you’ll last around 30-60 mins before an alarm sounds, the station falls into the sun, and everything explodes. Should you make it past the initial quests of stabilizing the ship’s orbit and stopping the ship from Actively Crashing Into The Sun, that only gives you an extra couple of hours (depending on choices further down the line it can be extended further, though) to complete the rest of the story before the orbit destabilizes once more and the ship Actively Crashes Into The Sun again. Combine this with the aforementioned hell that is locating the characters you need to talk to, and you can find yourself losing during the final stretch of the game just because you got lost one too many times and had to chase after people. Ask how I know. At least beating the game can be done pretty quickly, between 3-10 hours depending on which ending you take and how much of the map/character routines you already know. Playing this game is like Groundhog Day, if Groundhog Day was set in space and involved crashing into the sun.

It might sound odd to shit on a game so much and still say it’s one of my favorite PS1 titles, but it is. For one, the layout just feels right. The environment feels not quite claustrophobic, but tight enough that it feels like a realistic future space station. Hallways are wide enough for one person walking each way, but nothing else. Quarters come with a bed, a shower if you’re lucky, and a desk if you’re really lucky. There’s also only around 50 characters on the station - enough to be a believable staff for a station of this size and stop the map from being empty, but not too many that the devs couldn’t give everyone unique roles and routines. I even like the map, though I shat on it earlier - though it does take a lot of getting used to and I would recommend drawing your own copy as you go.

Even though there’s no side quests, there’s a few subplots to explore as you progress through the story and you do need to complete a few of the different endings to get the full picture of what’s happening aboard the station. Whether or not you encounter these plotlines depends on not just the route you’re currently on, but the ability for other characters to find you while walking around, so you can miss out on plotlines by simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or get involved in one the same way. Rather than having one Good Ending, a couple of Bad Endings, and a few Neutral Endings, there’s multiple ways to save the station, escape the station yourself (or with friends), and/or crash it into the sun. The closest you get to a ‘Golden ending’ is the one that gives you the highest score (Yeah, there’s a scoring system just like the old Sierra text adventures. I don’t get how it works though.), though that does involve completing most of the subplots and saving everyone, so it’s kind of golden in a way.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’d love to see this game remade somehow, whether that’s an overhaul mod, a modern recreation, or a spiritual successor of some kind. One with all the features modern open world adventure games expect, like a map, clock, and a quest tracker of some kind (If you take a break from playing and forget what you’re currently up to, by the time you’re back on track you’ve crashed into the sun). Very few of the reasons the game is bad are because of the story and world itself, rather, because the proper way to do an open world adventure game just hadn’t been invented yet. I think if the game could just have those few minor tweaks I think it could definitely be one of those games that could be a cult classic.