It's just you and your mouse lost in the bowels of a futuristic technopolis. Imagine Rube Goldberg on acid wandering in the basement of Biosphere Ten, and you're ready for L-Zone, the latest CD-ROM title from Synergy, the folks who brought us Alice (see WIRED 1.3).
With lots of electric dynamos, and lots of 60-cycle hum FX, this "Interactive Theater" on CD-ROM must hold the Guinness World Record for Most Buttons, Dials, Levers, and Switches in a Virtual World. As with Alice, there's nothing to learn, no instructions to follow; the idea is to navigate yourself through this technosphere, clicking every control panel, button, or sliding door in sight.
Beautifully designed and executed, L-Zone mixes a mind-boggling array of gadgetry with flashes of psychedelia, as when a random screen-click initiates a five-minute, hypnotic QuickTime collage of mandalas, spirals, and moire patterns.
It's likely you'll lose your sense of direction and/or your patience in L-Zone. Some of the devices are either dead ends or maddeningly impossible to figure out. As you click your cursor through an array of underground corridors, elevators, warehouses, and laboratories, there's a niggling sense that you've somehow failed to push the right button somewhere along the line.
L-Zone lacks the whimsy and humor of Alice, but you still get to do a lot of neat stuff, like re-animate a robot, blowtorch your way through a steel-clad door, and whisk around the tunnels of a space-age subway. Before you know it, you've been sucked into the L-Zone for a couple of hours.
- Jim Metzner
L-Zone: US$99. Produced by Synergy, Inc. and distributed in the US by East-West Communications: (800) 833 8339, +1 (310) 858 8797.
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