Symbiocom

About Symbiocom

Symbiocom is a first-person 3D game developed by Istvan Pely in 1998 and is the predecessor to Zero Critical (1999).

The player is a crew member aboard I.S.T. Rident, a class B space-faring passenger liner in the delta quadrant. Implanted into his/her brain is a "sym" (synthetic symbiont), a symbiotic artificial intelligence. As a maintenance engineer, the player was assigned to fix G1 gravity arrays, when Rident was experiencing a problem with its artificial gravity generators. As a safety measure the captain disabled the ship's worm-drive while work was underway on the gravity generator. Disabling the worm-drive reduced the speed and altitude of the vessel. Rident is then attacked by two warships, the Rident shakes violently knocking the passengers off balance and alarms start going off. The captain orders an SOS distress signal to be sent and hollers to prepare the lifeboats. The player falls unconscious while busy fixing ship’s gravitomagnetism.

The game starts when the player wakes up to the sound of his symplant hollering at him. I.S.T. Rident is left adrift in the depths of space and the player finds himself aboard a deserted spacecraft.

The player’s objective is not only to rescue himself from the crippled transport but also to find out who destroyed the ship and what happened to the ~163 passengers aboard.

The puzzles are inventory and logic types. Each location is displayed with 3D pre-rendered graphics, with a 360 degree view and "move along a rail" videos from location to location. There are five chapters in Symbiocom, each taking place in a different location. The locales are generally unpopulated. There are no character interactions in the game, it's just the player and his symplant. However, the player does encounter some drones, as well as an entertainment robot throughout the game.