Help me find browser game about alien embassy meltdown?

[CableCat]

Hello all,

About a year ago, I was browsing MelonLand and saw an image/banner in a user's signature that seemed ominous and interesting, and it linked to an external site that contained a point-and-click web browser story game.

In the story, you are playing as a human who is part of an organization doing cleanup of all these alien parts and investigation into their brain data. In the past (possibly the 1950's?) a species of allegedly peaceful aliens made contact with humans in the government and negotiated to get permission to build an embassy out on some island or underwater, or just way out in the sea where no normal person would find them. The aliens wanted to harvest something down in the deepest parts of the sea or something like that for research purposes. The aliens had these (maybe?) robotic brains and their bodies looked like some kind of 2D holograms.

The main storyline involves a specific team in the alien embassy, in which one specific member is basically a dimplomat who communicates directly with the humans with top secret clearance. She and her teammates discover some sort of time loop or something extra-dimensional that causes the entire Embassy to basically melt down in some weird inter-dimensional way. She and her team end up having to fight of some sort of monsters that are like crawling out of the fabric of time and space due to the meltdown. The aliens in the embassy are getting killed left and right. If I rememeber right, they are trying to get to a specific room in the embassy to shut down whatever is fueling the weird inter-dimensional time loop meltdown. A bunch of the doors no longer work due to the meltdown, but she has a seedy team member who somehow has either hacked or secretly possesses clearance to some kind of "master key" for the building where she can get them through walls or secret entrances or something. It is VERY questionable why she has this and if she is a trustworthy coworker. Or perhaps she is involved in a conspiracy to cause the meltdown.

In the current time, you (the human) and your (remote human) coworker recover the diplomat's brain and you have it in a part of your building that is a rare blind spot. There are no cameras or systems that have any record of you having her brain. Your human coworker helps you hack into the brain to relive her memories. None of the humans, even the ones in the government with top secret clearance, actually know what happened inside the alien Embassy that day. They only know it was a catastrophic event and a turning point, and the Aliens were super cagey about what actually happened. So it is a huge deal that you have the (damaged) brain and are secretly finding out what actually happened with legally questionable methods.

Visually, the game is mostly black with white text and lots of cyan and magenta lines. The aliens appear very geometric with spiky hair or almost like horns. They are flat and black, usually with stark eyes in blue or cyan. They look like they could be made with sharp geometric figures in microsoft paint. There is turn-based combat later in the game.

It has been driving me nuts for months that I cannot find the game again! I was close to the end, but I ended up working a lot and never got to finish it. The game had me so hooked that one night I played for like 8 hours straight and did not sleep a wink. I played until the sun started to come up. That is a super unusual thing for me to do, that's how GOOD the story was.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what the title was, or know the link to the site?

[xXWebMasterXx_Gina]

Woah! That sounds like a really cool game; now I want to play it XD!


We know it was played in the browser, so it's likely it was either Flash, HTML5 or even JavaScript based. Are you able to recall any details about how the game was hosted? Such as the site it was on, if the game was the whole site, or just a portion of it, if any plugins were used, etc.

You mention you found it through a MelonLand user's signature so it sounds like it could have potentially been someone's project hosted on their own website or even Itch page. But I wouldn't rule out Flash if this was the case, since there is still a modern Flash game scene, though you'd definitely need a plugin to play them on a modern browser.

Can you also recall anything that might be able to date the game? Maybe there was a copyright at the bottom of the page or even just quirks of the writing or art. You mention the aliens are geometric so that gives it kind of a retro look in my head. Stuff like this probably won't help narrow it down too much but you never know!

Actually now that I think about it... you said the primary colors used were Magenta, Cyan and Black. That sounds like a DOS game using CGA graphics. That could either mean that the website hosted an actual DOS game to play in your browser or it was simply just mimicking the style. There's a collection of some on Itch at https://itch.io/jam/cga-jam/entries for reference.

[xixxii]

was it corru.observer? i haven't played it so i don't know how well the story matches up, but i've glanced at it and it's mostly black with white text and cyan/magenta... good luck finding the thing if not!

[TheFrugalGamer]

was it corru.observer? i haven't played it so i don't know how well the story matches up, but i've glanced at it and it's mostly black with white text and cyan/magenta... good luck finding the thing if not!

I'd be surprised if it wasn't corru.observer, because the intro description of the story was jogging my memory, and this is what i was remembering! Either way, excellent game, and excellent use of HTML5 to build a world and tell a story. I got sucked into it too and ended up spending a whole afternoon playing it unexpectedly.