PATHOS - Demo

In the year 20XX, a remote prison's simulated world is being ravaged by a lone hacker. You must stop them at all costs.

THE GAME

PATHOS is a short interactive fiction demo, originally built for academic research purposes. You are OPERA-09, an agent dispatched to repair the AR-GUS prison system, a containment facility where inmates are held in stasis while their minds are rehabilitated in a virtual world. Upon your arrival, you discover that the system has been heavily compromised by a hacker, and it is up to you to stop them.

CONTROLS

Mouse + Keyboard. LMB to select icons. LMB/Z to continue conversation. X to speed up text.

ABOUT

PATHOS was originally conceived for research purposes, so it should only take around 30 minutes to complete. This short project ended up becoming a full plotline to a game that I might well go on to make, complete with pseudo-first-person exploration of the virtual AR-GUS prison, evidence gathering, more involved gameplay, more characters, and of course, continuation of the story covered in this 'intro' segment. For the moment, the game is mostly handled through dialogue, has only a couple of characters, and features only a taste of what the full game might be.

At the end there'll be an option to participate in my research: this is entirely anonymous, and would really help me out!

The current release is v.0.26 for Windows only, and should be mostly stable.

Anyway, hope you find it vaguely interesting!

Update as of 16/12/2018
Due to some recent extra attention PATHOS has been getting, I thought I'd clarify a few things:

• Research submissions are no longer being accepted (that's long done). The forms will be dead if you link to them at the end of the game.
• I'm no longer supporting this version of the game, and have no current plans to fix the outstanding bugs. I haven't touched this for a while and the project file would now be sufficiently difficult to update to the latest version of Stencyl that it's not on my to-do list.
• I am currently moving forward with the project in another game engine and intend to release the full game under another name.