/vr/ - Retro Games

Sentient is one of the most bizarre, fascinating, and potentially engrossing games to be found on the PS1, a port of a Windows game of the same name. In Sentient you are a technician sent to a space station orbiting an alien sun that currently has two problems: its orbit is failing, bringing it ever close to the sun, and its crew is suffering of radiation disease, which is lethal. The game has an unseen time limit during which you must fix one of these problems to avoid a faster Game Over.

However, Sentient goes far beyond that. In a space colony with 62 different characters, all of which you can interact with and befriend, the possibilities are infinite. The game is full of possible plot lines or side-quests (many of which are red herrings), you can experience twelve different endings depending on which aspects you prioritize, and the combination of NPC actions and interactions is basically infinite in its scope.

The character models leave much to be desired, looking like digitized real-world faces pasted on stocky polygon models, and the whole game looks kind of washed-out and dingy compared to the Windows original, but this also gives it an interestingly surreal feel. Interaction is handled through classic adventure game text parser dialogue commands, which can seem unnecessarily long-winded at first but clearly allows you to interact with Sentient's world to a fuller degree. This is a potentially obsession-causing game if you can get past its clunkier aspects and see into the mind-boggling array of possibilities it offers, as a sort of outer space social survival sim.