Video Game / Voyage: Inspired by Jules Verne

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In the game, you play as Michel Ardan, one of three people who've taken off in a spaceship on a trip to the Moon. On the way there, Michel passes out, and when he comes to, the others are dead, and he's in a bit of a pickle because his oxygen supply is quickly trickling down to nothing. From there, Michel must...

a) Solve the mystery of his traveling partners' murders.

b) Make more oxygen for himself.

c) Make sure his capsule reaches the Moon in a manner that won't end with him dying in a crash landing.

Should he survive, Michel finds himself on the Moon, where he discovers an unbelievably vibrant ecosystem. He also discovers the Selenites, who don't take kindly to his presence there...

The game was developed by Kheops Studio and published by The Adventure Company. It was released on March 3rd, 2006.

Voyage: Inspired by Jules Verne contains examples of:

• 3 + 5 = 4: The bottom-most floor of the lunar settlemen, called the Hall of Secret Antiquities, has a machine that dispenses a pink liquid called "Klipsaggt's essence" that is required to cook up a plot-critical substance but has the nasty habit of exploding if the wrong amount is used. The correct one is three units, but the machine's tank loads nine at a time and the player's jerrycan fills with four.
• Alien Sky: Climbing to the top of the stairway on the wall of the crater reveals a black sky with red nebulae and even a few galaxies. Despite, you know, being supposed to be the same sky as over Earth.
• Aliens Speaking English: The Selenites are capable of speaking human languages, though only the dignitary knows them. This is because in the game's lore, they visited Earth millennia ago, and he has access to the historical records (though that still wouldn't explain how he specifically knows 19th-century English).
• Alternative Number System: The Selenites use a base-20 system that is identical to the Mayan one except for the zero, which is a square. Figuring it out allows the player to open some doors without using the appropriate keys.
• Ancient Astronauts: Selenites traveled to Earth millennia ago, reportedly "just as our ancestors started to walk on their hind legs". Amusingly, they went back and forth exactly the same way as Verne imagined: with hollow cannonballs! The first sublevel of the settlement has a mural with posable human figures that can be made to worship a Selenite (doing so opens a compartment underneath the mural containing the control panel of a communication array in the next room).
• Artistic License – Physics: Aside from the storytelling necessity of ignoring how a cannon capable of exceeding Earth's escape velocity would reduce any living thing into pulp:
  • Like in the original novels, Ardan experiences gravity throughout the entire trip except for very briefly at the Earth-Moon gravitational equilibrium point.
  • The player is required to throw several items out of the shell to reduce its weight and slow down the fall towards the Moon, despite it still having no air, meaning the acceleration would still be the same.
  • On the second sublevel of the Selenite colony, there's spherical mushrooms similar to orange soccerballs growing on the ceiling of one room. Despite the Moon having far too little gravity to allow such falling velocities, when mature they drop to the floor like anvils.
• Bitter Almonds: Interacting with Nicholl's face has Ardan comment about such odor. Sure enough, the locker contains a bottle of cyanide-based disinfectant and a glass with the same smell, quickly establishing his cause of death.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: The Selenites, similar to the description given in The First Men in the Moon, are insect-like long-limbed aliens with a metallic blue skin, large bulbous heads with an exposed brain, big black eyes, large red cloak-like shoulders, tiny torsos, and three-fingered hands. They also communicate by making organ music-like noises, and light up their eyes and brain lobes as formal greetings.
• Breakable Weapons: The can opener breaks after the player uses it to open an oddly tincan-esque coffin. Thankfully, it can later be glued back together in case the player prefers canned food over alien fruit salad for lunch. Similarly, the rifle will bend if used to pry open another coffin in place of the iron bar found in the tincan one, but can straightened out with the exposed piston of the Lumen machine.
• Bullet Time: One of the mixed Moon fruit jams has a Downplayed version of this as effect. It doesn't actually slow down general gameplay, only the cursor of the jump minigame required to get around in the crater and the speed at which the aforementioned mushrooms fall from the ceiling. As with all food-induced status effects, it wears off by itself after a while.
• Burial in Space: In order to lighten the cannonball enough to avoid a lethal crash-landing, the player is required to wrap blankets over the dead bodies of Barbicane and Nicholl, tie them up, and then throw them out the hatch.
• Canon Foreigner: Ardan's investigation into the deaths of Barbicane and Nicholl leads him to find some letters on their bodies from an original character named Diana, a woman who he initially suspects to have been a lover for both and a motive for mutual murder. However, examining all of them establishes she was simply trying to seduce either of them into letting her tag along, to no success. Ultimately her only influence on the game is giving the crew a notebook used to record Selenite ideograms for the player's reference.
• Can't Hold His Liquor: Drinking a single glass of wine causes instant drunkenness. Luckily, drinking a glass of water instantly cures it.
• Completely Different Title: The English one, as its French title translates to Journey to the Center of the Moon (and is localized correspondingly in most other languages).
• Convection, Schmonvection: The game inexplicably has several lava pots lying around (despite the Moon being a geologically-dead planetoid with no volcanism). The Selenites seem to use them as stoves, and of course they're no more dangerous to be around, meaning they're completely harmless unless you click on them while holding explosives. Accordingly, their main use in-game is allowing the player to cook food without having to go back to the cannonball to use the gas burner.
  • Even weirder, lava is also channeled through a gold pipe to fuel a communication array... somehow.
• Early-Bird Cameo: The symbol on the inventory button used to empty container items later pops up as the Selenite ideogram for the matemathical zero and the act of emptying something.
• Flavor Text: Most items have one, of vastly variable lenghts.
• Fantastic Flora: There are 5 plants of different colors (green, blue, yellow, violet, and red) on the Moon, all of which are aware of their surroundings as they react to things near them. They seem to be quite predatory, as that reaction is hostility and they have different weapons (strangling vines, jaws, poison gas sacks, spine shooters, and blades) and defensive adaptations (thorns, reinforced bark, elevated organs, broad leaves, and thickened stem) they use to kill each other. Every species has all but one the adaptations, including the one that counters its own weapon, resulting in a five-way Rock-Paper-Scissors situation where each plant wins over another one, loses to a second one, and is neutral towards the other two. The Selenites (and the player) exploit this by utilizing saplings as intimidation to move about forested areas without the risk of being attacked. Oh, and they sing too.
• Fantastic Racism: All Selenites eagerly remind you in every conversation that they regard humans as inherently inferior and primitive.
  • Mentally-impaired Selenites living off raw fruits on the surface amount to little more than very aggressive sheep to the rest of the "civilized" population dwelling in the vast underground colonies. At one point, they even get used as beasts of burden to carry the player's cannonball to the lunar cannon.
• Hammerspace: You are able to effortlessly carry two dead bodies at once in the inventory.
• Hemisphere Bias: Averted. Despite being a French game, Earth always is always seen from the western Pacific side, with Australia clearly visible.
• In Name Only: The game draws much more material from The First Men in the Moon than Around the Moon, since the plot diverges right from the start with the death of two out of the three main characters and, as the title implies, the lunar landing never happened in the book.
• Interface Screw: Downplayed. Two of the mixed lunar fruit jams turn the screen green or violet for some time. It is actually slightly useful in that those effects allow you to read invisible tips hidden in a couple of points of the game. On the other hand, wine (and oddly enough, grape jam) causes an Impairment Shot of some kind (the camera waving back and forth, shakily jerking around when you turn, or periodicaly jolting up due to hiccups). Thankfully, all of these effects can be reverted with a plain glass of water.
• Interplanetary Voyage: It's even in the title.
• Item Crafting: One of the elements of the game is to combine multiple items together to help in solving puzzles. And lot of it is needed.
• Joke Item: There are a few items that have no apparent use: a golden pendant, the rusty hand and elbow parts of a prostethic Selenite arm, and a dead tree branch. Still, the latter can be burned into potassium, and the others can be sold to the dignitary for a bit of money.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: Actual graverobbing is required to advance the game. The lunar ruler later calls you out on this, and demands you put back all the items taken from the Selenite coffin before letting you proceed with the endgame (but not the human one, of course).
• Language Barrier: No Selenite except the dignitary speaks the player's tongue, preventing Ardan from understanding what they're saying until he learns the lunar language through a minigame, and he can't reply back to them until he fixes a flute specifically designed allow humans to emulate spoken Selenite.
• Made of Explodium: In addition to Klipsaggt's essence, the falling mushrooms mentioned above burst in a puff of spores on contact with the ground. If the player is in Bullet Time (or has ludicrous reflexes), they can catch one, but it will pop anyway after a few seconds, though they don't hurt Ardan at all. The only way to salvage them is enclosing them in the leakproof globe, which nets you a jar of spores. Hilariously enough, the trope is then taken literally as those spores are revealed to be an ingredient for a Selenite explosive.
• No Biochemical Barriers: Ardan has absolutely no difficulty eating and digesting the lunar fruits. The first time he sees one he does wonders aloud whether it is edible, but then adds that he wants to try it anyway (he comments they aren't bad when he does). Conversely, Selenites don't seem to even notice when he dumps his canned food into their nutrient slop. It leans into Exaggerated territory as Power-Up Food has exactly the same effects on both races despite their obviously different biologies. The only difference in chemical tolerances mentioned in-game is that Selenites are not poisoned by chlorine gas.
  • It even gets to the point that grapevine and cotton plant from Earth can hybridize with Voracia (the blue plant), creating lunar versions of grape and cotton respectively.
• Oxygen Meter: The shell is equipped with a physical one, right next to the oxygen generator (a burner filled with potassium chlorate). The first proper puzzle of the game consists of the burner running out right after the player unscrews the window shields, allowing Ardan to realize he's in space: the meter will slowly start dropping, and after it bottoms out, a second one will appear on the right side of the screen, accompanied by a hourglass and an alarming music track. The player will then proceed to keep dying until they figure out they need to take the spare bag of potassium chlorate from the locker and put it in the empty burner. This happens again soon after, when the shell difts in the shadow of the moon, however the burner will still be full, and this time the solution is cranking up the gas valve, which will also counteract the heat loss.
• Plant Aliens: Five different species of aggressive lunar plants pose obstacles to your explorations. Their fruit is crucial to completion of the game.
• Power-Up Food: The fruits of the lunar plants can be mixed and cooked in a pan to make jam (called "compounds" in-game). Four of them, when eaten, give the player special effects for a limited time (two variants of off-color vision, Bullet Time, and… drunkenness).
• Rainbow Speak: Some characters have special colors for subtitles:
  • The dignitary: Green.
  • The spy bug: Violet.
  • The ruler: Light green.
  • The other Selenites: Yellow.
  • The rooster: Light blue.
  • The plants: The same color they are coded as.
• Sequel Hook: After getting off the Moon, Ardan lands on Earth, and finds himself on a desert island, and is found by Captain Nemo, while the Lunar Ruler muses that they'll have to take measures against the return of humans. Unfortunately, Return to Mysterious Island 2 shows that nothing came out of it, as the player there finds a machine with a record of Ardan's memories showing that Nemo refused to let him leave.
• Skeleton Key: There are many keylocks scattered throughout the game, labelled with Selenite numbers from 1 to 3 (plus a single level 0 lock in the elevator), though they serve to reveal hints for solving puzzles, or skip them outright, more often than opening doors. Keys are also marked this way, and can open any lock whose number is equal or lower to their own. The level 3 key can hence open all locks in the game.
  • It is explained that these keys are like badges of rank assigned based on intelligence and wisdom (meaning the player can only obtain them if they reached a certain number of points), and the locks are intended to keep people away from devices that they might not be smart enough to handle without harm, rather than crime prevention or privacy. Level 2 and 3 keys can only be granted by direct request to the Grand Lunar, the leader of the Selenites. Since a level 3 lock is involved in activating the cannon to Earth, the player needs to get all the keys to beat the game.
• Space Is Cold: As soon as the cannonball enters the Moon's shadow, frost quickly covers the windows, and the player will die unless they turn up the oxygen burner.
• Spoiler Cover: Some physical covers for the game (as well as the main menu) prominently feature Selenites, ruining the surprise of meeting them.
• Starfish Language: The Selenites' language is basically organ music. Ardan needs to use a special flute to speak it.
• Surveillance Drone: The spy bugs. They're the size of flies and appear to be sentient, as the one assigned to watch over Ardan takes a liking to him and begins whispering tips about Selenite technology to his ear once the player learns to understand the local language.
• The Many Deaths of You: Each with its own woodcut-style illustration. In order:
  • Suffocating because of oxygen deprivation.
  • Blowing up because you interacted with fire or lava while holding something explosive.
  • Crashing on the Moon because you didn't slow down the descent enough.
  • Miscalculating a jump on the Moon and…
    • …falling into the pit between the forest and the walls of the crater.
    • …smashing into the walls of the crater.
    • …falling in the middle of the forest and getting mauled by the plants.
  • Falling through the elevator shaft because you stepped in while the car wasn't there.
  • Blowing up because you tried to use the wrong amount of Klipsaggt's essence.
  • Screwing up something with the lunar cannon that should bring you back on Earth, like…
    • …blowing up because you weren't quick enough and the explosive change set off while you were still getting inside the cannonball.
    • …blowing up because you did reach the cannonball, but forgot to close the hatch and/or to place the armor cover over it.
    • …suffocating because you forgot to bring items that produce oxygen or absorb carbon dioxide.
    • …locking ourself out of the cannon, deliberately not even trying to get aboard the cannonball, and watching it return to Earth empty. More of a Non-Standard Game Over however, as Ardan lives on, with nothing to do other than playing the organ and resolving Selenite quizzes.
• Timed Power-Up: All status effects expire after some time, except oxygen drunkness.
• Translation Convention: Averted. After learning how to understand spoken Selenite, every time it is heard, it is subtitled, not dubbed. However, this includes even the basic vocalizations used by the regressed caveman-like exiled, or the plants. Before learning it, subtitles show a bunch of random symbols.
• Translator Microbes: The Selenite dignitary has a "Belbaab conch" on his desk, a conical shell that he states allows him to understand the barbaric human language when the player tries to examine it. Ardan can find one for himself in the forest at the surface, which reveals that, somehow, it allows the one who carries it to understand any language whatsoever, even those of the lunar plants and the rooster Ardan smuggled on the capsule (in fact, interacting with the latter with the conch on triggers a Bilingual Dialogue as feathered animal is perfectly able to comprehend human speech; he will complain about how he was marooned on the Moon against his will and tell Ardan to hurry up finding away back home, after which he will refuse to talk again for the rest of the game).
• Underground City: Nearly all Selenites live in one due to their extreme isolationism (and also because the atmosphere freezes for two weeks every month). According to the cutscene triggered by going for the first time to the inhabitated floors, they much are deeper down that the first two sublevels, the only ones with outside access. Probably because the third sublevel (the dormitory, which is where the vast majority of the Selenite civilians apparently reside) looks absolutely immense. In addition, Selenites like to make it clear that, in their culture, even so much as stepping on the surface is considered abhorrent (humans' appreciation for touching grass being one reason they are considered inferior). The mentally-ill are exiled there, and "shepherding" them is considered a lowly job as it sometimes requires going up too (the shepherd Selenite the player meets at said dormitory wears a robe bearing a rank of zero).
• Unobtanium: Lumen is a glowing blue liquid used for illumination, made by dissolving a local mineral in nitric acid and then mashing the mixture with a piston. Due to that acid component, it is stated to be corrosive, and can only be picked up by using the jerrycan.
  • Any item obtained by running Sagittaria (the violet plant) in any shape or form through the purifier machine is somehow an ingredient for crafting something incredibly useful. To wit:
    • Refining a fruit produces a fragrant violet slime called "Brozlyss' concentrate". Combined with a blue fruit and Lumen it crystallizes into "Brozludjak's Oxyding Preparate", a violet dust that gives off oxygen, which can be used as an alternative to potassium chlorate to prevent death by hypoxia on the return trip.
    • Refining a violet and green fruit jam produces a slime called "Yrsaggt's concentrate". Mixed with Selenite spit it becomes "Yrshnouff's gluing substance", a powerful adhesive.
    • Refining a violet and red fruit jam produces a slime called "Zubroo's concentrate". Mixed with Selenite spit it becomes "Zubdssik's oily amalgam", a lubricant.
    • Refining a sapling produces "Klipsgaal's soft isotopes", seven thingies that look like three-pointed snowflakes (but also violet). One of them is lighter than the others, and it must be sorted out with an electronic scale. This lighter isotope, combined with a blue fruit and the aforementioned Klipsaggt's essence, produces "Klipso's lightening paint", a substance that once dried reduces the weight of anything it was applied to.
    • Refining a sapling hybridized with the green plant produces "Xulmi's crystalline powder", which looks like the isotopes but with green patches. Combining them with salt creates "Xuldakir's star", a crystal in the shape of a four-pointed star that, when placed in the machine at the entrance of the Hall of Secret Antiquities, shrinks the player, allowing them to get inside through a hole in the wall next to the door (which requires a level 3 key to open).
    • Refining a sapling hybridized with the red plant produces "Prultuuk's crystalline powder", isotopes with red patches. Mixed with the spores of the falling mushroom they turn into "Prulmiis' explosive aggregate", a kind of lunar gunpowder.
• Video Game Tools: A given with anything, since there's no fighting in this game. The rifle is really only useful as a lever or to break open the gunpowder barrel, as flavor text says the barrel was deformed by the shot Nicholl used to kill Barbicane.
• Wham Shot:
  • Opening the tomb next to the gate of the necropolis, revealing a human skull.
  • Living Selenites taking Ardan in custody when he tries to go below the second sublevel of the mountain, and bringing him to the dignitary.
• You Wake Up in a Room: The game begins with Michel Ardan waking up on a capsule bound for the Moon with his travel companions dead.