It is set in the world of early 22nd Century, when infertility has become the dominant problem facing humanity as the result of the general ecological collapse, which also led to the formation of a totalitarian one-world government. By the time the game rolls around, only one child has been born as a result of a natural pregnancy, who has spent her entire life observed in the labs as a result. Yet, Wilona Hart, a scientist and a daughter of one of the highest-ranking Ministers, decides she must aid the Infrared rebels and free the child regardless.
Tropes present in this game:
- 20 Minutes into the Future: The game is set about a century from its release day. In its estimation, this is enough time for all billions of humans to have gone infertile, for animals as undemanding as chickens and turtles to have gone extinct and become a distant memory, and for sentient Artificials to both get created, and then get destroyed, and become confined to history books. That's not even counting the tech like practical invisibility, or the omnipresent flying cars.
- Call A Hitpoint A Smeerp: Instead of HP, the encounters are based on Motivation, with positive events raising it and negative ones draining it, eventually causing the character to flee (or a Game Over for Wilona, as she abandons her quest.)
- Crapsack World: The world of the 22nd century is a heavily polluted place, which much of the biosphere dead and all the known humans are rendered infertile and live under a clearly oppressive government.
- Cutscene Incompetence: Wilona manages to only to end up decloaking in a cutscene right in front of two civilians
- Dialogue Tree: Wilona gets to select multiple responses when in a conversation. The options that are simply questions are marked with circles, while those that advance the conversation are marked with a fast-forward icon. Unlike a lot of examples, she also voices out the exact same text you have already read and selected, which many other games consider redundant.
- Eskimos Aren't Real: Inverted: next to Wilona's book of "Invisibility for Beginners", you have her pencil drawing of "Animals I wish I'd seen", which has a rooster, a panda, an elephant and a tortoise in the corners, yet a purple unicorn in the center. The idea is that even an accomplished scientist like her now believes that unicorns were just as real as those now-extinct animals, to illustrate just how bad things have gotten with the biosphere.
- Faceless Goons: The so-called Bolts wear bright white helmets with pure black, full face-covering masks.
- Failed a Spot Check: Since Wilona's mother is a Minister, she is able get the door to her apartment digitally locked down. Wilona hacks it back to normal, however, and walks out to find an engineer a few steps outside her door, who was apparently so busy with two malfunctioning delivery bots, that she missed the whole thing. To be fair, the voice alert "Lockdown in effect" wasn't particularly loud.
- Flying Car: They appear to be virtually omnipresent in the 22nd century, and Wilona casually hacks into a then-parked taxi cab to make her getaway from the apartment block and towards The Trench.
- Fun with Acronyms: Invoked. In a note on her computer, Wilona writes about her homemade Invisibility Cloak, and ponders making a "cute name" for it, considering Covert Locomotion and Orientation Action Kontraption and Complex Light Omitting Anti Knowing-I'm-there-device, before finally deciding that just Cloak is fine.
- Hacking Minigame: Wilona can perform a Remote Hack from BraceCom, which involves unlocking Hacking Nodes, which will then unlock a Function Node. This is further split into firewall, line breach and hacks. The former is turn-based, as you rotate a 3D shape until it fits a 3D outline, and have a limited number of available moves before the hack fails, but no time limit. Line Breaches are real-time, as you need to move a circular core into the dock while outrunning a security program, and taking care not to fall off the limited area available for movement. Lastly, Communications Hacks (which literally allow Wilona to listen in on patrols' conversations, or even straight-up give them orders) are again turn-based with limited moves, and consist of generating an audio ping on the abstract playable area and then moving to whichever direction generates an echo (illustrated by the ping wave turning from blue to green in that direction.)
- Notably, her computer actually has a "Hacking Practice" suite, which has somehow gone completely unnoticed!
- Hologram: uses a BraceCom, which is literally a bracelet that projects out holograms of her communications. Luckily, it functions like a real hologram, and so is invisible to anyone else.
- Invisibility Cloak: Wilona develops one on her own right before the events of the game, in order to aid her breakout plans. According to her personal notes, phased-array optics solution wasn't good enough, and so the device literally "stiches actual Planck scales together" somehow, which may have officially "reached a quantum level of scope". Then again, apparently law enforcement agencies have been this principle for a working invincibility tech for a long time. Either way, it is crucial for the game's turn-based stealth, where it is often the only way to go through a turn without being seen. However, it also drains power like crazy, forcing Wilona to regularly loot batteries whenever she can find them, as they only sustain invisibility for about 3 turns before burning out.
- The Password Is Always "Swordfish": A strange variation. If you interact with Wilona's computer in the starting room, you'll see that turning it on immediately demonstrates three folders: "My Pictures", "Personal Stuff" and "Hacking Practice"! Given that she is living in a society oppressive enough that her mother (a Minister) was able to remotely lock down her apartment with a single command and zero supervision from anyone else, it's a wonder there was apparently zero digital surveillance to detect something this obvious.
- Shout-Out: When discussing malfunctioning delivery bots with an Engineer, one option is "Have you tried turning them off and on again?"
- Take Cover!: Downplayed; while the cover mechanic isn't mechanically different from the other top-down turn-based games, its purpose here is to conceal the character for stealth purposes, rather than to receive protection from the enemies' shots.
- Turned Against Their Masters: A book in Wilona's apartment describes that there were so-called Artificials in the not-so distant past and they rebelled, and were ultimately crushed. Now, the society is back towards using dumb bots that routinely malfunction, but have no chance of rebelling again.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: The ability to essentially shoot fleeing enemies in the back is hard to describe as anything else.
- Western Terrorists: The Infrareds faction, of which Wilona is a part. Of course, here it's very much a case of Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters.
