Terminus

“The angels said I'd smile today Well who needs angels, anyway?”

— Sara Bereilles

Terminus (or Lachrymose in the Labyrinth) is a game by Bomb Productions Games. Being a Bomb Production, please do not edit except for spelling errors. It is for the PC and Mac, and its general plot explores a very drastically depressed and amnesiac person named Lachrymose who finds himself trapped in a strange and mysterious facility with no memory of past events and must find a way out.

Gameplay:

Terminus is a first-person adventure game with some elements of puzzle-platformers. It centrally revolves around Lachrymose, the player character, as you navigate as him through the facility, interacting with various NPCs and solving puzzle-like objectives along the way. NPCs are important to the game, as it is largely story-driven in more ways than one. You possess no immediate weapons in the game except for your hands, which are chiefly used to solve the puzzles throughout the game. The facility is rather labyrinth-like and difficult to traverse through, and the puzzles open up various passageways and shortcuts throughout the maze to help you through. In the HUD, you possess bars for Health and Sanity. Your Health bar is influenced by the amount of rations you consume and the amount of damage taken from falling, getting injured, or the ocassional enemy. Rations can be found throughout the facility, although scarce, and while enemies are also scarce, they are possible to be beaten. The facility has many unexpected twists and turns, and falling from formidable heights or being caught in the ocassional trap is not an impossible occurrence. Your Sanity bar depletes when you stay in one area too long and/or wander around the facility without opening passageways via puzzles for too long of a time. A depleting Sanity bar also depletes your Health bar, and vice-versa. A depleting Sanity bar also manipulates your sight, and makes your character hard to control and also causes you to hallucenate (when hallucenating, you typically see very frightening and disturbing images pop out at you). Complete depletion of both bars causes you to die, which brings you back to the last puzzle you completed; there are no lives in Terminus. Additionally, you eventually gain a computer-controlled NPC companion named Whither, who hides whenever you try and look at him. You gain use of him when you get deeper into the facility and more enemies begin to appear, at which point Whither's special ability kicks in. When there is an enemy, you just press the S key, and Whither will attack them for you (after you turn away from him, of course).

Plot:

The game begins as someone's eyes open to find themselves in a white room. This is Lachrymose; the only indication of his name is the word Lachrymose carved into his wrist, which he immediately observes. He rubs his head, and asks no one in particular "Where am I?". He looks around the room, which is a rather tight, wide white room with no doors or windows and that is more wide than it is tall. Lachrymose's Sanity and Health bars pop up in the HUD, and his Sanity bar slowly starts to deplete, at which points he starts to sob and hyperventilate as the bar goes down. He frantically must move around the room, at which point he eventually finds a pressure plate in the corner and one of the sides of the room slides upward, revealing a tunnel of sorts and a light on the other side. From the other side, he hears a voice that says "Don't be shy; come on in". So, he proceeds to crawl through the tunnel, which turns out to progressively get smaller and smaller in height as it progresses (his Sanity bar also depletes as he goes through the tunnel). Eventually, Lachrymose has to squeeze himself through a very tight, seemingly impossible space to fit through, at which point thick crunching sounds are heard and his Health bar depletes halfway, as well as his Sanity bar if there is any left in it to deplete. He slowly and hesitantly crawls more, groaning and panting the whole way through, and then the tunnel gets a bit bigger progressively, at which point his Sanity bar gradually increases.

When he gets out of the tunnel, he appears in a rather large white room like the rest, and sprawls himself on the floor. A few speakers are present on the walls, and they turn on after a few seconds.

More to come...