The stark premise.
Find the Cure!
is an in-browser text-based adventure game published on itch.io in January 2016. It tells the story of an unnamed traveler who passes through a wormhole seeking the cure to a deadly disease ravaging Earth.If you're looking for the trope, see Find the Cure!.
This game provides examples of:
- Artistic License – Chemistry: The traveller destroys a locked door by throwing a vial of "stabilized francium" into a bucket of water. As an alkali metal, francium would indeed react violently with water, but its half-life is so quick that realistically one could never stabilize it.
- Apocalypse How: Multiversal species extinction. Both dimensions of Earth were infected with the Time Plague, however, one dimension managed to cure it and one didn't.
- Cool Gate: The Einstein-Rosen bridge is a giant metallic structure. The traveller's secondary objective is to repower it, since they burnt it out during their initial travel.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: It's a game where your driving goal is to find the cure.
- Featureless Protagonist: We don't even know if the traveller was the leader of the search team that discovered the Einstein-Rosen bridge.
- Find the Cure!: Surprise!
- Fingerprinting Air: The traveller uses tape to lift a fingerprint from a mop handle to gain access to the infirmary.
- Gratuitous Laboratory Flasks: The supply closet is described as containing "beakers and jars of various chemicals."
- Hazmat Suit: The Arc Flash suit the traveller uses to bypass the infirmary turret. It's explicitly stated to be bulky and uncomfortable.
- Hollywood Acid: The traveller uses acid to burn the lock off the electrician's closet.
- Last-Second Ending Choice: The traveller has ten seconds to decide whether to return to their version of Earth with the cure, or remain in the new dimension and enjoy a life not spent in a ravaged hellhole.
- The Plague: The Time Plague kills anyone who encounters an infected person after exactly 25 years.
- Text Parser: Averted. Unlike most text-based adventure games, choices are made by choosing from a list of options and pressing the appropriate key, like a Gamebook.
- Sole Survivor: The traveller was the only member of their search party who was able to jump through the Einstein-Rosen bridge and reach the other dimension. It wasn't stated whether the others were killed mid-route or simply didn't jump in fast enough.
- If the traveller chooses to stay in the other dimension, everyone else from their Earth will be dead within 25 years.
- Static Stun Gun: The security turret in the control room.
- Standalone Episode: Set in the Darwin's Soldiers universe, but has nothing to do with any character, location or story from other Darwin's Soldiers media.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The scientists from the other dimension were completely oblivious to the deadly plague they brought to Earth.
