Video Game / Detritus

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The cargo ship CTRL-FIVE has suffered a catastrophic hull failure with no survivors.

And yet... Jean Wilson, the Communications Officer, wakes up disoriented and groggy in the Fabrication room of the ship. The Artificial Gravity is off. The Computer Voice speaking to her sounds wrong. The Emergency Protocols are in effect.

It's all really fracking unpleasant.

Detritus by radiosity (who also wrote Lunium) is a Sci-Fi Horror Interactive Fiction game written in Twine — play it here.

These tropes have no idea what happened to the ship

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: AI's replacing humans is a big concern for the setting. GAIL, the ship's AI, seems awfully suspicious, with her unreliability and those bursts of odd "humor"... but is actually a Three Laws-Compliant Benevolent A.I. who tried her best to save her crew despite the company trying to reprogram her through Subspace Ansible. The Security Officer has limited her access to some parts of the ship anyway.
• Amnesiac Hero: When Jean first wakes, she has trouble remembering who she is and what's been happening. Because she's not entirely Jean Wilson anymore.
• Borrowed Biometric Bypass: Unfortunately, some areas of the ship are biometrically locked and only the (living) captan or the engineer can access them. Jean needs to find a way around this. By reprinting herself in captain's body.
• Continuous Decompression: The result of opening the door at the beginning of the game. It can't be avoided and it kills Jean, only to get her reprinted again. Besides that, the ship's hull has been breached in some places, which is why Jean can't get out of the Fabrication room until she finds a spacesuit.
  Hull fragment (large): A large portion of the ship's hull, made from a metal and polymer alloy. This is probably the result of a catastrophic hull failure. If found, please panic.
• Cyberpunk for Flavor: Artificial Intelligence-laden world with corporations in the mould of Weyland-Yutani, but we mostly see a single spaceship. And if you play things right, Jean and GAIL may throw a wrench into the corporation's plot.
• Data Pad: Scattered throughout the ship, they provide some Story Breadcrumbs, some clues and flesh out the setting.
• Dream Melody: Jean tends to hum a melody to calm herself down that she isn't sure where she's learned. It's "Bring Back My Bonnie to Me" and the crew used to sing it together.
• Do Androids Dream?: GAIL and the player character both are not quite human but they definitely dream and have feelings. The MegaCorp who sent them into space is much more inhuman.
• Energy Weapon: A plasma gun is one of the items that can be synthetised. Jean worries a bit about the possibility that Space Pirates were the cause of her ship's hull breach, but decides they weren't since she can't hear any shots.
• Enter Solution Here: Some of the cabins on the ship are locked with codes, some with Magic Square Puzzles.
• Escape Pod: It's a Red Herring — the player never has opportunity to reach it, let alone use it.
• Explosive Instrumentation: A failed attempt to fix the engines results in a small explosion.
• A Father to His Men: Jean remembers captain Olsen this way.
• First-Person Smartass: Somewhat unusually for Interactive Fiction, this game is narrated in first person by Jean, who can be a bit snarky, especially when describing pickable items:
  Pot plant: A small green plant designed to make tediously boring office spaces seem more attractive.
• Flashback: Jean has a number of them, which is apparently normal after being reprinted, and conveniently fills the player in about the events preceding the crash. There's also some subtle Foreshadowing of the events that followed the crash.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The Computer Voice Jean hears when first revived doesn't sound like GAIL because it's the copy of GAIL running in emergency mode from the cargo bay.
  • CTRL-FIVE is a 'Theseus' class ship. As in Theseus' Ship Paradox — when ships' parts are replaced, is it still the same ship? Also, the name itself references the keyboard shortcut for pasting
  • Jean's flashbacks are not all from her point of view because she's got her colleagues' memories in her mind.
• Future Food Is Artificial: Food items contain a suspicious amount of "polymers" resource... Of course, proteins and sugars are, chemically speaking, polymers, but the game has a separate "biomass" resource.
  A 'Saturn' bar: A bar of chocolate^*contains 3.5% chocolate with a picture of Saturn on the front, sealed in thick plastic. Also tastes of plastic.
• Fusion Dance: "Jean" as recreated by GAIL, is a composite of all the crewmembers, if mostly Jean Wilson.
• Matter Replicator: The Recycler (which breaks items down into basic components) and the Fabricator (which allows the player to synthetise them) are the key tools available in the game. Matter replication is a widespread technology in the setting. It's not quite Infinite Supplies and requires energy input, but still. Replicating humans (called "reprinting") is mostly illegal due to a host of reasons, although spaceship crews are allowed to have "backups". Jean struggles with Clone Angst throughout.
• MacGyvering: Fixing the engines requires it, since the Fabricator doesn't have the schematics for the necessary parts, so things found around the ship have to suffice.
• Minimalist Cast: Jean and GAIL. That's it. The rest of the crew appears in flashbacks, but it's still only a four-person ship.
• The Mutiny: Technically, barratry, as the crew unanimously (unless the player chooses to dissent) decided to go on strike. It went a bit less smoothly than in The Martian, though.
• My Life Flashed Before My Eyes: Jean references the trope when revived:
  They say that your entire life flashes before your eyes just before you die. Then… nothing.
  Well, imagine that, but in reverse.
  One moment I didn't exist, the next…
• Only One Me Allowed Right Now: Due to legal restrictions and limited resources, only a single copy of a single crewmember can be running at a time. But mind and body are backed-up separately and nothing stops you from combining Jean's mind with captain's body.
• Resources Management Gameplay: One, Jean needs to mind her hunger, thirst and oxygen (unless you choose an easy mode). Two, all the items she picks up can be decomposed and recycled into other items accordingly to her needs. The amount of items she can carry on her is also limited, but can be increased.
• Resurrection/Death Loop: Jean being the only person in the ship's emergency backup buffer, she seems to be condemned to this until she figures out how to fix the ship and get back home. She — the Jean alive for most of the game, not the one who dies in prologue — is the twenty-seventh attempt by GAIL to get it done. And it's taken four months, not four minutes as she initially assumed.
• Sinister Surveillance: GAIL has been keeping track on the crew's every movement, both for training data and to allow the company back home to know what they're doing. Jean is uneasy about this.
• Shout-Out:
  • GAIL's attempts at joking include asking whether she should open "pod bay doors" and singing "Daisy…" despite her actually acting just the opposite of HAL, even though she is being creepy at the moment.
  • If you examine a paperclip, the description mentions the paperclip maximiser.
  • If Jean uses the Energy Weapon against the real GAIL in the cargo bay, Frankenstein is rererenced.
  • A sonic wrench is a fabricable (and useful) item.
• Sole Survivor: Jean, who has to figure out what happened and patch up the ship entirely by herself, since she can't really trust GAIL.
• Subspace Ansible: Since the company reprograms GAIL in real time the setting definitely has these.
• Warp Whistle: Once the player has downloaded the deck plan into the spacesuit, it becomes possible to instantly travel to any previously visited room on the deck Jean currently is on.