Biosys

[biosynth8]

Most people probably never heard of Biosys, a PC game that came out in 1999, as it only saw the light of day in the UK where it was made and Germany. That fact alone leaves me puzzled why it wasn't offered on a wider English-speaking market. Sales were terrible and a planned sequel was cancelled. It's my favourite game to this day, though I haven't played it in maybe 15 years. Most of what I write is form my memories alone. I'll try not to spoil anything past the first hour or so, but it's generally a very short game, so that might be too much already.

It's basicly a puzzle-adventure game done in a myst-like style, but with a more or less dynamic environment and survival mechanics. The latter, a common theme nowadays, was extremely rare in the late 90s and early 2000s. I think this is because it was always badly implemented and therefore either meaningless or extremely punishing (Robinson's Requiem, anyone?). Biosys, however, handled the survival mechanics in a relaxed but still realistic way. Health and wellbeing of the player character could become a major issue if you didn't take care, but wouldn't stand in your way if you kept it in mind. Most of it felt natural - except that you were able to sleep everywhere, including a swamp hole, but rain would always wake you up.

You play as Dr. Alan Russell, a scientist who wakes up in the middle of a jungle with - how else could it start - amnesia, only remembering what you saw in the intro sequence: You running away from fire through some kind of tunnel. You soon find out that you are trappend in a complex made out of four giant glasshouses, biospheres, containing different biomes. The structure, called Biosphere 4, is a billion dollar research facility, isolated in the Andes. For some reason, you seem to be alone there.

Here's where it gets really interesting: First, the main character is somwhere in his 70s. He's an old man. He's still fit, but you have to keep his age in mind as you play the game. Putting him under too much stress, carrying too much weight, pressing on while tired - these things might be detrimental to his health. You might not notice now, maybe he starts getting tired sooner, maybe he seems weaker... Yeah, you can get yourself in an unwinable situation like that. Out of convinience, I once had him eat too much canned meat over weeks. The game wasn't much fun to play with coronary heart disease and high blood pressure. You have a meter that tells you how good your diet is. Chances are, though, you‘ll never look at it before it is too late.

Second: Russell's backstory seems to be extremely dark. You soon find out that he once was a major environmental activist, head of an international group on the way to influencing legislation in many countires. Then, out of nowhere, he abandoned his organization, effectivly killing it. Instead, he started working for Subtech, a company developing technology for oil drilling. They bought him by making his dream, the construction of Biosphere 4, come true. And, as it seems, they also keep him quiet by blackmailing him: Russell seems to have hired a hitman to murder an old friend from his environmentalist days decades ago.

It gets even worse. After years of paying for the research project and not getting enough out of it, Subtech planned on turning the glass houses into a luxury resort. Ignoring Russell‘s angry protest, the construction of „Club Eden“ started. You find notes written by the foreman complaing about Russell snooping around the construction site, stealing stuff and sabotaging machines. Then the fire happend, with toxic fumes killing every single worker at the site, their corpses slowly rotting (yes, they visibly decay!) there as you play through the game. If you get Russell drunk on mescal, he‘ll shout out how they all deserved it.

And that's just the beginning. If that‘s not an interesting character for a PC game, I‘ve never seen one. The game start by telling you: You fucked this up, because you are a terrible human being. Oh, but at least you didn't play Dr. Frankenstein and create a monster, too. Or did you?  Of course, many things are not as they seem, but they never are, are they? But there you are, haunted by nightmares (I still know the poems from them by heart) and you are probably going to die from an overdose of prescription medication or by pouring water on electrical equipment. 

So what is Russell trying to achieve? He‘s trying to get out of his sealed glass domes to escape the wrath of his former boss and possibly justice. But for that you have to get all the systems damaged by fire and toxic smoke back running. You slowly gain control of the enviromental controls, water purification, energy production and so on. Sometimes it can feel like an educational game, making you remember what kind of biome needs what at which time of the year. And it is educational! As a teen I got an A in biology because I could explain how exactly reverse osmosis water filtration works due to this game. Nevertheless, it‘s always more of a quite dark adventure.

From todays standpoint, the graphics are rather ugly. The resolution is low, as well as the colors. While I always loved the environments, I thought it was rather ugly back when I bought it in 1999. The puzzels are varied, mainly employing dumbed down real life logic, that is kind of hard to explain sometimes. Most of it is rather simple, though. The game has its fair share of bugs and was never patched. For example the meters for thirst and hunger are swapped, forcing you to eat much more often than to drink. This probably makes the game much easier, because the ways to transport water are limited, open water is often polluted or full of germs and drinking from taps drains hundreds of liters of water from the system for some reason. Some scenes failed to load properly in my version and there were game-breaking graphics issues.

I never finished the game. I always stopped before taking the last step at the end. I don‘t know why. Maybe I felt so at home in the environment I could control.

So how can you play it today? Well, if you get your fingers on an old copy, forget it with anything more modern than Windows 95. But there is a free version floating around the web, an all-inclusive installer that contains a virtual machine of the OS. That‘s probably not legal, though.

[biosynth8]

11 minutes ago, RaTcHeT302 said:

yeah unless the 90s cops figure out time travel, I THINK WE ARE GONNA BE FINE

 

edit: oh i misread that, you meant windows 95 itself is included also, mhhh, i dunno, i guess it's a grey area, but still, i don't think there's really any real risk to it, it would be insane if someone got in trouble for playing an old game on windows 95 of all things

 

I think it's not a grey area in most countries, it's just unlikely that someone cares.

[biosynth8]

 

11 minutes ago, RaTcHeT302 said:

the law is dumb

 

i feel like there are worse crimes than using a 30 year old operating system (WHICH CANNOT BE BOUGHT)

 

True. You know that the whole of Project Gutenberg is blocked in Germany because the heirs of Thomas Mann sued them over offering "The Buddenbrooks" for download? That's the direction we are heading!

Edited September 10, 2020 by biosynth8 (see edit history)

[biosynth8]

1 hour ago, RaTcHeT302 said:

sorry i don't follow, what's project gutenberg?

That's a site where you can download public domain ebooks.

[biosynth8]

5 minutes ago, RaTcHeT302 said:

oooh like that russian, science pirate papery thing, i forgot the name

No, not at all like that. It's all public domain. And just one book where the public domain status is disputed made and it got blocked. But thanks for the link, I forgot about that site too and I can use it at the moment.

Edited September 10, 2020 by biosynth8 (see edit history)

[centersolace]

Interesting game, reminds me of Myst.

[biosynth8]

On 11/21/2020 at 9:38 PM, centersolace said:

Interesting game, reminds me of Myst.

I think it was considered a "Myst clone" at the time, as it was a whole genre. It's far easier though. Even if you can't solve a puzzle (it's hard to call them puzzles, because they often seem more like workarounds to broken stuff) you might stumble upon the solution by accident. Most of it can be solved by real life logic. The only part where I got stuck was when you had to get a heavy rock lifted from a corpse. 

Spoiler

You had to give yourself a shot of adrenalin in order to roll it a way.

I did not think of that solution because it seemed to video-gamey at the time.

[biosynth8]

I recently watched "Silent Running" with Bruce Dern again. It has a lot of similarities in plot and setting and Alan Russell is definitely a bit modeled after Bruce Dern's character Freeman Lowell. Russell even has a poster of that movie in his house. The funny thing is, that it actually went that way: The movie Silent Running was the inspiration for the construction of the ill-fated Biosphere-2 project in Arizona, and Biosphere-2 was the main inspiration for BioSys.

[centersolace]

On 12/5/2020 at 5:21 AM, biosynth8 said:

I recently watched "Silent Running" with Bruce Dern again. It has a lot of similarities in plot and setting and Alan Russell is definitely a bit modeled after Bruce Dern's character Freeman Lowell. Russell even has a poster of that movie in his house. The funny thing is, that it actually went that way: The movie Silent Running was the inspiration for the construction of the ill-fated Biosphere-2 project in Arizona, and Biosphere-2 was the main inspiration for BioSys.

Huh. I didn't think that at first but now that you mention it I see the resemblance.

[Acceberbex]

We used to play this in science lessons sometimes. I never got the hang of it/got anywhere near completeing (no-one in my class did). Those weird spider things that dropped down from the trees made us all jump. I just wandered around the ocean or savannah normally

I'd love to play it again..so if anyone knows how to get it, I'd love to know.

[biosynth8]

17 hours ago, Acceberbex said:

We used to play this in science lessons sometimes. I never got the hang of it/got anywhere near completeing (no-one in my class did). Those weird spider things that dropped down from the trees made us all jump. I just wandered around the ocean or savannah normally

I'd love to play it again..so if anyone knows how to get it, I'd love to know.

Search for Zomb's Lair. There's a package including a virtual machine with Windows 95. It's almost impossible to run any other way. I wish I could run my German version again, I really liked the voice acting. 

Those weren't spiders, they were aggressive plants. They don't appear before quite late in the game actually. If you have come that far, you almost got it. But that's also the point where you have to start messing with the environmental controls. Come to think, I guess you can beat the whole game in less than two or three hours.

Edited April 28, 2021 by biosynth8 (see edit history)

[biosynth8]

I played the game again after more than twenty years and finally completed it. It has a nice, short ending cinematic. It really made me wonder whether there are different endings nobody has discovered yet. I'm sure it was planned, but never implemented.

It holds up better than I thought, just like most Myst-clones do. The controls are very simple, everything is smooth, no cluckyness like in most action games of the 90s. 

It took me a bit longer to complete as I thought because there are actually many different solutions to the technical problems and I chose the ones that take longer. Furthermore there's just so much stuff to do that is completely useless. There's for example a huge amount of survival equipment you'll probably never need. Come to think, I don't know how I managed to die that much in the game as a kid. It's very lenient with food and water intake, the liquids can also be completely satisfied by food with high water content. In this playthrough I only died when trying to die. Though, of course, you can easily die from spider bites, malaria or poisonings if you don't manage to reach the medical lab early in the game.

Sadly, the scene when you are shot was as buggy in this version as in the one I had as a kid. I couldn't read the obituary of that either. That's a shame, since it was one of the main reasons why I wanted to play this game again: To see all the different obituaries and the one you get after being murdered by Devlin's lackeys is totally different from the ones you get when you get yourself killed.

 

One that note: Is it possible that Sam Devlin is supposed to be Steve Bannon? People from the original Biosphere 2 project worked on the game and Biosphere 2 was aquired by Bannon after it had failed so miserably.

 

All in all, it would be a great game for a remake as it allready ticks many boxes of a modern survival game. Just add crafting and base building and you are good to go. The technosphere management could also be expanded, as it is easily one of the best parts of the game - keeping everything running, look after the health of the plants, managing the different water and air tanks... And there are allready unkillable enemies that - kind of - pursue you.

Of course, nobody is mad enough to do something like this.

But hey, one can dream - and a biosphere management game really would be the game of my dreams.

[biosynth8]

On 4/27/2021 at 10:31 PM, Acceberbex said:

We used to play this in science lessons sometimes. I never got the hang of it/got anywhere near completeing (no-one in my class did). Those weird spider things that dropped down from the trees made us all jump. I just wandered around the ocean or savannah normally

I'd love to play it again..so if anyone knows how to get it, I'd love to know.

I just found it on myabandonware, too: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/biosys-f2f