Traveler's Enigma

About
Story
Making-of

"Traveler's Enigma" is a first-person PC adventure game designed by Matthew Lyles Hornbostel. Following in the footsteps of games like "Rhem", "Alida", and "The Crystal Key", "Traveler's Enigma" is essentially a single person's project. As such, it has been and still is a long journey from concept to completion; the effort to make an epic adventure game with a large number of places, puzzles, and story ideas was difficult and time-consuming. Basically, this game production was one I began in August 2005... and basically shelved at the end of 2008. I had seriously considered leaving it unfinished indefinitely... as it's effectively a train wreck and a technical/creative embarrassment. It is a very very poor, disjointed attempt at a first-person adventure game... stuck in 640x480 resolution with puzzles that feel tacked-on and way, way too much text. And it's Windows-only, which kinda sucks. The announcement I'm making now is this: I'm resuming the production, trying to get it patched together quickly with 'duct tape, glue, and twine', or whatever the digital equivalent is... making a 30-40 hour effort, in between other things, to finally get this piece of junk online in some form. The good news - or bad, depending on what your point of view is - is that I'm picking up the project again instead of abandoning it, and "Traveler's Enigma" is actually going to be finished, by December 2011. The bad news? It's not going to be freeware after all. It's going to be a $0.42 item. You can decide whether or not this is an acceptable price to pay for this insane, overblown, ambitious but misguided misfire of a computer game production which has taken far, far too long on the road to release.

You are a scientist some 40 years in the future. The world has largely been destroyed through war, economic chaos, disease pandemics, and the depletion of vital natural resources. The remnants of the human race have formed a tightly controlled social system. Freedoms and individual rights are ceded in exchange for peace, security, stability, food, and water. Even this marginally acceptable social order is now collapsing. You are a scientist on a top-secret research project. Your goal is - or was - to create an interdimensional gateway; a bridge to the past in an attempt to change it. However, the experiment has not gone as planned... Note: While certain aspects of the storyline remain the same as before, others have been heavily revised, over and over. Some of it might not really fit together well and some of it is, let's just say, pretty loopy and crazy and weird, with deeply disturbing content, a lot of ambiguity, and some religious themes viewed in unusual ways. I'm trying to make this pile of random bits from my 'past self' fit together better but I don't think it will be at all coherent... just take it 'as is', a bunch of intriguing dark weirdness that doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense. I'll just do the best I can with it, given the timeframe I've assigned myself.

A note from Matthew Lyles Hornbostel:

Well, you've heard the news. I'm going to actually finish making this game, after a long, long hiatus. It's now going to be a 42-cent sale product, not freeware. I think part of why I held back on releasing this game was, I was afraid of the firestorm of controversy it'd generate. But by now I've been the object of ignorant hate and ridicule enough times that I've started to realize that there's no way to be a creative artist and not have some people hate you. Being a public figure who shows (his/her) work to the public, will always, always generate some criticism from some people. That's okay. I'd rather create something and have it eviscerated by criticism, than be paralyzed by fear and not produce anything at all. So I'm finishing this game... partly because there are some people who want to see it finished (and keep asking, 'when will you finish it?'), partly because the extra cash could help me finish other, better projects (like "Isola") and partly because I like to finish what I start (even if it takes years to do so). I've poured hundreds of hours into this production already and I'd rather not just abandon it in a stage of near-completion. So I'm going to set a deadline for release - Nov. 20, 2011 - and do everything I can to meet that deadline.