Suspended

About

You’re stuck deep underground in a frozen complex, forced to rely on six robots to fix a planet spiraling into disaster. This text-based adventure from Infocom drops you in the role of a cryogenically suspended AI whose robots each have one sensory superpower, like sight or hearing, while the rest of their perception is blanked. You issue commands to these bots to investigate crumbling systems and stop a breakdown that’ll destroy the surface world. The twist is you can only trust the senses each robot possesses, forcing you to piece together clues indirectly through their limited perspectives. Suspended is a tightly written puzzle game that thrives on clever constraints. Community ratings peg it at a solid 4.5/5, praising the layered problem solving and tense urgency of its premise. The robots’ design forces creative thinking about how to combine their abilities, like using a microphone-equipped bot to locate a sound source then directing a sighted bot to follow it. Running on dozens of retro platforms but still sharp in its design, it’s a 1980s classic that feels surprisingly modern in how it forces you to think around limitations rather than through brute force.

Storyline

You are the Central Mentality on an advanced semi-automated planet. You were supposed to sleep—in limited cryogenic suspension—for the next 500 years, 20 miles beneath the surface of the planet, while the great Filtering Computers maintained all surface systems. But the computers have taken you out of suspension because something is terribly wrong: the weather has become brutal, food production is dangerously low, and the Transportation System is malfunctioning, causing unprecedented accidents and casualties. The planet is in chaos. You are physically immobilized. But you have six robots at your disposal, and you must manipulate them strategically to bring the Filtering Computers back into balance. Each robot has a distinct perception of the world and offers you specific abilities—one offers you sight; a second, hearing; a third, access to information in the computer memory banks. Through the robots, you must save the planet from destruction.