Incognito Episode 3

John Smith (generic name, you can choose your own) is a man in trouble. He’s lost everything he has in the Stock Market, his house is in danger of being washed away due to erosion. All he has is a life insurance policy. Depressed and despondent, he decides to end it all. Climbing to the top of his office building. A split second before he hits the ground, a wormhole opens up, and he vanishes! John awakens in a strange place. It’s clearly a high-tech world, but he can’t read any of the writing or understand the language he’s hearing. What’s going on; is he dead and in Hell?

Incognito is meant to deliver simplified versions of gameplay from different genres and bring them together into a game that’s epic in scale and requires different genre skills but is easy for the average hardcore gamer to jump into and play from beginning to end.

These genres change at each “zoom level” of the game:

• When you’re on foot, it’s a First-Person Shooter with RPG elements
• When you’re in your ship, it’s a Space Trading/Combat Simulation
• When you’re in low orbit of a planet, it’s a Simple Real-Time Strategy Game
• When you’re in your hovertank, it’s a Tank Combat Game

In order to progess through each Episode, you’ll have to conquer challenges at each level, gathering information on foot, exploring in your ship, landing on uninhabited planets and establishing bases, and on hostile planets, invading a planet’s surface defenses in the hovertank.

The player assumes control of an older gentlemen in his late 50′s or 60′s (it is not given specifics only appearance). Working since graduation from college with honors in Business Management and Accounting the protagonist is employed by the Caligula Investment Firm and leads a simple life of a paper pusher, his life for all intensive purposes uninteresting. That is until he succumbs to substance abuse in the form of Cocaine as the company takes a turn for the worst unrelated to his binge his world turned upside down and within years end his employers are in ruins and debts are owed to which our player has no way to recovery.

Mid-life crisis, no family, no children to continue his legacy he climbs the tallest building with the intent to set himself free. Free from his existence, free from his debts, free from obligation and worry. He lets himself fall from the building but before he can reach the pavement something impossible happens. Someone or something doesn’t want this to happen or maybe it’s pure coincidence but either way a rift opens destroying everything it touches as it empties into a vast expanse of nothing as it stretches under the protagonist and catches his fall.

What appears to be a worm hole in every sense of the word carries the old man from one side of the universe to a place that is on no map, a place that humans have never touched or heard of before. He is not dead, or so he thinks, the high is wearing off from his binge at this point and the cold reality of where he is really begins to set in. Inside a ship, empty…no signs of life, no unique smells or tastes, colors, of any kind. It all seems so alien but so comprehensible at the same time. Surely this must be his remaining synaptic functions left in his skull playing tricks with him but alas nothing faded and everything is real to the touch.

It is not long before the now player/protagonist combination encounter the on-board artificial intelligence which offers assistance and guidance once figuring out the dialect the player speaks. They are then guided though a short tutorial on how to operate their inventory, access control panels, heal themselves, keep the ship in proper running order, and navigate the stars to make the most cash with what cargo they have picked up. The computer only knows that it was left here specifically for you and has been waiting some time but will not specify exactly how long. It offers coordinates to a place of origin that it was sent from to wait for you, apparently to meet whoever thought this was a good idea.

Are you apart of some experiment? Did this being know this would happen? Why all the precautions? What could they want with an old man? These are questions that the player must seek to answer for themselves if they wish, and if not then completing their original task of killing themselves should not prove too difficult