A New Beginning preview

As all right-thinking people know, there are two reasons not to worry about the environment. If the babbling of fools is correct, the world will end in 2012 anyway. If not, television has long since taught us that if things get too bad, Gaia, spirit of the Earth, will send five magic rings to five special young people, and Captain Planet will clear up our mess. It wouldn’t lie about something like that, right?

There is of course a third possibility. Maybe nothing will change. Maybe the world will continue its spiral into chaos and decay, rendering the planet a barren wasteland where the surface can no longer support life and every day is a miserable existence of swallowing down food pills and waiting for a solar flare to scythe through the atmosphere and finally put us all out of our misery. Maybe in those dark days, only the sudden invention of time travel will offer some form of escape, allowing representatives of humanity to jump back and seek help from the one man who could have set it all right. That man is named Bent Svennson, and if you’re wondering how many cheap jokes about that are coming: just one, promise.

Despite the environmental angle, don’t worry – from the bits we’ve played so far, A New Beginning is neither preachy nor educational. The plot is pure sci-fi, involving a clash between one magic power-source that nukes the Earth, and a race to get it replaced with another magic one that turns simple algae into the ultimate fuel. By the end, there may be a puzzle where you need to sort the recycling into the correct bins or plant a tree, but most of the first chapter at least is more about running around a futuristic San Francisco, followed by a trip back to modern times where you find yourself finding ways to use aftershave and scrap paper to escape from a helicopter in mid-flight, and then sabotaging an energy conference with a badly forged press ID. If controlling emissions can’t save the world, then by god, at least we have adventure game puzzle logic to fall back on! (It’s also darkly amusing that the very first real puzzle, in which you control arch-environmentalist Bent, ends up with you lazily killing a bird.)

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