This is an epic about good and evil, lies, slavery, paranoia, futurism, fantasy, convoluted histories, deranged speculation, suffering, science, spirituality, despair, mortality, love and hate. I tried to make it so many things, and in such a dark and twisted mess, that it almost defies description. Suffice it to say that it is disturbing, controversial, unsettling, strange.

This is not a game for children. It is a frightening and bizarre fiction about the end of the human race and the loss of boundaries between the real and the false, the natural and the supernatural.

It features a panoramic interface, inventive puzzles, an embedded "smart" hint guide which parcels out help based on your progress and whether you're stuck, a wide range of CG environments, loads of cutscenes and even more text, an ambient music score by Iain Morland and myself, and performances by a list of actors including local award-winner Gordon C. Williams.

The world's infrastructure was crushed, the planet poisoned by nerve gas, bioweapons, and nuclear fallout, and the people of the Earth so sick of war that they would sacrifice anything, even their most basic freedoms, for peace, food, and medicine. A charismatic young leader rises to power over Eurasia and then the world. He crushes dissent, attempting to control the minds and hearts of the world through application of psychology, addiction, and ultimately cybernetic interfaces and genetic engineering - saving humanity by redesigning it so that it is no longer human.

I began making this game in 2005, in response to a feeling that my projects were fun but didn't mean anything. So I started making a game in Adventure Maker, with graphics done in Photoshop and Lightwave. It grew and grew. I had new ideas supplanting old ones. I had pieces that didn't fit together well enough. I kept adding updates on HornbostelMedia.com suggesting that it'd be done soon, because at the time I thought it would. I was adding things I thought would improve it, resulting in a seemingly endless condition of feature creep. The project proved far more involved than I'd first imagined. I fixed bugs, added puzzles and features, rewrote pieces of the story.

Now, in 2009, I'm getting close to what I feel is a finished game. It's not ideal, of course - much of the story, the art, the technology can be traced back to 2005 or 2006, so we're looking at a 4-year production during which my skills have improved dramatically. If it doesn't fit together cohesively in your view, if some elements seem a bit "tacked on", and if certain bits feel "old" or "bad" compared to what I'm doing with, say, "Duel 2030" (which is in some ways a companion piece to this in that they're both dystopic views of the future) - well, now you know why. Even if the quality is inconsistent, you'll find that the scale of this game is immense.