Suspicious Cargo

In the future, humanity suffers from a deadly virus. The only antidote functions like a drug and big corporations exploit this situation. They are free to act without any supervision and this results in armed war between them. The hero Jonah Hayes, small-time smuggler, has no part in this until he gets force-employed by one of those corporations to bring a living freight, a product of genetic engineering, to Earth.

Suspicious Cargo is a text adventure with a graphical user interface. It is not necessary to type in commands into the text field; the commands can be constructed by clicking on the symbols of the user interface. When talking to other people, the topic can be chosen from a list. The symbol bars can be hidden in order to play the game as pure text adventure – the only bar which is always shown is the systems bar. It offers the possibility to open up a full-screen picture to illustrate some situations and a map which is used to quickly travel inside the space ship.

The challenges faced in the game mostly deal with obstacles the hero faces on his way to Earth, e.g, sabotage acts by competing companies. There are also some action sequences like opening a lock or landing on a moon spliced into the story, but those are completely optional.