The Orion Conspiracy is a sci-fi point-and-click adventure game from Divide by Zero and Domark about a bereaved father trying to solve the mystery of his astronaut son's death.
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The Orion Conspiracy is a space station adventure about two stories that have surprisingly little to do with each other. It's predominately a whodunit in which the protagonist searches for his son's killer, and then it climaxes with a gory rendition of Star Trek's "The Man Trap". Both plotlines are pretty clichéd, though the former is noteworthy for treating a gay relationship seriously (certainly not a given for a commercial computer game from 1995) and the latter has its cheap genre thrills. Useful backstory is provided through corporate e-mails found in the manual and the brief but nifty prequel comic Devlin's Story.
The biggest issue with The Orion Conspiracy is its pacing. The Cerberus space station has five decks, four of which are split into separate segments that can only be accessed by using different elevators on deck two. The bulk of decks three through five are taken up by circular loops containing the crew quarters, and plot-relevant locations often end up being at the furthest point from an elevator. As a result, it feels like over half the game is spent directing the protagonist down largely indistinguishable corridors, most of which you'll never interact with in any other capacity. The back of the box advertises "100 hand-painted background scenes", but the experience would have been a lot better if that number was closer to 50.
For a 1990s adventure game, the puzzles are reasonably logical. There's never any Sierra-style gotchas; in fact, I didn't encounter a single failure state, minus a softlock that occurred when I tried to speak to a corpse!
Contemporary reviews tended to consider the game's profanity to be excessive; today, most of it seems charmingly edgy. The major exceptions are the racial slurs spoken by the security chief, an over-the-top antagonist (and obvious murder mystery red herring) who begins the game by insulting the player character for having PTSD and being Irish! Amusingly, despite many f-words, an n-word and some disembowelments, the game is rated T for Teen by the ESRB.
The biggest issue with The Orion Conspiracy is its pacing. The Cerberus space station has five decks, four of which are split into separate segments that can only be accessed by using different elevators on deck two. The bulk of decks three through five are taken up by circular loops containing the crew quarters, and plot-relevant locations often end up being at the furthest point from an elevator. As a result, it feels like over half the game is spent directing the protagonist down largely indistinguishable corridors, most of which you'll never interact with in any other capacity. The back of the box advertises "100 hand-painted background scenes", but the experience would have been a lot better if that number was closer to 50.
For a 1990s adventure game, the puzzles are reasonably logical. There's never any Sierra-style gotchas; in fact, I didn't encounter a single failure state, minus a softlock that occurred when I tried to speak to a corpse!
Contemporary reviews tended to consider the game's profanity to be excessive; today, most of it seems charmingly edgy. The major exceptions are the racial slurs spoken by the security chief, an over-the-top antagonist (and obvious murder mystery red herring) who begins the game by insulting the player character for having PTSD and being Irish! Amusingly, despite many f-words, an n-word and some disembowelments, the game is rated T for Teen by the ESRB.