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More than 5 years ago I played an indie game set on a sleeper ship. I remember a lot about the game mechanics and the story, yet I can't recall the name and so I can't find it anywhere.

  • I played it on a PC, the language was English, I don't remember if it had any translations.
  • the story is set on a very long narrow spaceship made out of interconnected segments, like a caterpillar.
  • the ship carries a large number (possibly millions) of cryogenically frozen humans on a very long journey
  • there is only one single human overseer awake at any one time, to do very boring and routine control tasks at the helm of the ship, and they take turns (every year, or every x months, the overseer is sent to sleep, and the next in line is woken up to take his place)
  • this human overseer is the protagonist
  • the game is almost completely text-based, with minimalistic header graphics. If it had graphics at all, it was confined to the top portion of the screen and was very simplistic. The narration was in text.
  • travel takes a long time, using a vehicle or shuttle, to travel along the length of the ship, segment to segment
  • the plot of the game is started with a report of damage from a segment quite far from the front of the the ship, which the player has to examine
  • most (or all) of the game is played by selecting from a number of options to perform.

it turns out the predecessor of the player got mad from boredom, thawed out some passengers, and started a cannibalistic cult, thawing out and eating other passengers, which has been ongoing for a long time. The end-game is the protagonist trying to race forward towards the controls at the front of the ship, trying to outrun the cultists.

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  • Seedship? boingboing.net/2018/01/23/…
    – Valorum
    Aug 29, 2021 at 19:00
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    @Valorum : No. I know seedship, and it doesn't even get close. There you play an AI, there is nothing about segments of a ship, you go from planet to planet to start a colony. The game in the question has no mention of playing as the AI or colonizing planets.
    – vsz
    Aug 29, 2021 at 19:05
  • Could you describe UI a bit more? Was it bright or dark? 2D/2.5D? What was visualized?
    – Yaroslav Kornachevskyi
    Aug 29, 2021 at 19:44
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    @YaroslavKornachevskyi Text-based. All the interaction with the game was text-based with next to no visualization. The only visualization was some rough depiction of the ship, but everything was narrated in next only, and all the interaction was text-based.
    – vsz
    Aug 29, 2021 at 19:58
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    If you had asked about it being a movie, I would have suggested Pandorum.
    – Engineer Toast
    Aug 30, 2021 at 13:31

2 Answers 2

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Capsule

I searched it in vain at other places, because I was certain that it wasn't pure Interactive Fiction (it wasn't console-based like IF typically is)

But lacking other options, and no keywords to search for in the IF database, I started crawling though it, and it's there. It's IF, but not the typical IF. It is not console-based, and it has (limited) graphics.

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    Choice based works are very much included in the definition of "Interactive Fiction", and have been for a long while now. Probably close to half of entries in the annual IFComp are written in Twine or other choice based systems. What you call "console-based" is commonly called "parser-based". For example, see the IFTF's FAQ: iftechfoundation.org/frequently-asked-questions
    – curiousdannii
    Aug 31, 2021 at 2:22
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I know that you self-answered your question with Capsule, but your description really evokes Snowball (the first installation of Silicon Dreams trilogy) by Level 9 Computing.

The game involves a cryogenically frozen protagonist (Kim Kimberley) who is awoken, with procedurally generated rooms

Perhaps capsule was a remake or homage to the 1983 classic.

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3
  • Can you explain why it matches?
    – FuzzyBoots
    Aug 30, 2021 at 20:03
  • The game also involves cryogenically frozen protagonist (Kim Kimberley) who is awoken, with procedurally generated rooms.
    – Boluc Papuccuoglu
    Aug 30, 2021 at 20:06
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    :) Including that in your answer would improve it.
    – FuzzyBoots
    Aug 30, 2021 at 20:17

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