#37: Tower of Babel (Rainbird, Amiga, 1990)

The turn of the ’90s was apparently a good time for sci-fi games, and Tower of Babel is another. It’s a puzzle game abstract enough that it definitely needs the manual to get its story, though. In brief: Humans decided to build a tower of, you know, biblical proportions. It caught the attention of aliens, who decided to send some robot spiders to help them, as you do. Most of the humans were frightened and gave flight. Some of them stayed and worked on the making the tower bigger still. Later, though, the humans got suspicious of these helpful immigrants with their knowledge and skills and their apparent loyalties elsewhere, and turned against them, setting up all kinds of barriers to their freedom to live and work. In comes the game, where, excellently, you play as the robots.

I’ve now recreated the high point of the Tower of Babel experience for you, at least if you’re coming to it in 2016 and aren’t marvelled by a three-dimensional environment, any three-dimensional environment. See, I wanted to get to pitting my wits against those damn humans and their traps, but the pedantic menu screens were the first clue that it wasn’t to be that simple. Tower of Babel introduces itself like some kind of technical project management software that won’t make a lot of sense to you right now, but just think of the future business! It makes itself look like boring work, and it lives up to it.