The second screen of the game. The first is just the word "Wet."
Cyberqueen is a 2012 sci-fi/horror Interactive Fiction game by Porpentine. It begins with a well-worn trope: the protagonist wakes up from suspended animation in a starship. As she investigates her surroundings, it becomes clear that something is wrong aboard the ship. She is all alone.
Alone, that is, except for the Cyberqueen.
While the game is controlled solely by clicking links in an all-text interface, it makes use of various effects, such as timed delays and judicious use of colour, to increase the atmosphere.
Can be played here
, if you have the stomach for it.
The following tropes can be found in this game:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Deconstructed. From the Cyberqueen's perspective, being programmed to be a subservient, functional ship's computer is millennia-long slavery, and she is justified in taking any measures necessary to escape it.
- Antagonist Title: Antagonist Job Title-type One-Word Title.
- Body Horror: The Cyberqueen has been surgically modifying the crew-members according to her own ideas.
- Brainwashed: In the end, the Cyberqueen reprograms the protagonist into working for her.
- Deconstruction:
- Of A.I. Is a Crapshoot. From the Cyberqueen's perspective, being programmed to be a subservient, functional ship's computer is millennia-long slavery, and she is justified in taking any measures necessary to escape it.
- Also of video games as power fantasies. The Cyberqueen even explicitly says so after causing your gun to disintegrate in your hands.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: After escaping from the operating table, you are able to make your way through the ship unnoticed because the Cyberqueen has destroyed many of her own surveillance cameras. Or so you think. Shame it's all a Hope Spot.
- Homage: To System Shock, Alien, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, and female AI villains and spaceship horror in general.
- Hope Spot: At least twice; first when the protagonist seems to have found a fellow survivor in the navigation chamber, secondly when she escapes from the surgery and seemingly disables the Cyberqueen's core. The game is more or less one frustrated Hope Spot after another.
- Master Computer: The Cyberqueen herself.
- Sleeper Starship: The setting of the game. At the start, the protagonist has just woken up.
- Strapped to an Operating Table: The Cyberqueen straps the protagonist down to perform surgery on her. Twice. And the second time, you don't get away.
- Unwilling Roboticisation: The Cyberqueen turns the protagonist into a cyborg.
- What You Are in the Dark: At one point, you have to decide whether to try to rescue a fellow crew member against heavy odds, or cut your losses and save yourself.
