Space Quest V: The Next Mutation
1993
Audio: English
- point-and-click
- puzzle
- adventure
- science fiction
- comedy
- single player
The story
After travelling back and forth through time in the previous game, Roger Wilco is back in the Starfleet Acadamy, serving as both a cadet and a janitor. Cheating his way through the Starfleet Aptitude Test, Roger is finally given the rank of captain, his own ship (a garbage scow) and a mission: to explore strange new worlds (which no man in his right mind would explore), to seek out new life and new civilizations (which grew out of the massive amounts of trash Roger will collect on his way), to boldly go where no man has gone before. Step by step Roger will have to unveil a galaxy-wide biohazardous material dumping scheme, solve the mystery of the disappearance of a fellow Starfleet captain and his ship, and confront an agent of an old nemesis.
What it’s like
Bright, cartoonish VGA pixel art with flat primary colours and clean hand-drawn outlines, the look of a early-1990s Sierra adventure at full 256-colour strength. Corridors of gleaming white starbase, cluttered junkyard hulls, and alien planets rendered in lurid greens and oranges all read like painted backdrops, and the sprite animation has the bouncy, slightly stiff charm of a cartoon. Music is a breezy MIDI-era score of jaunty synth tunes and sci-fi stingers that loop cheerfully under every room. Vibe: goofy, wry, sunny, with a gentle sense of mischief. It suits a lazy Saturday with a laptop, a nostalgic evening at a DOS emulator, or a cheerful puzzle session with no time pressure. Pacing is unhurried and exploratory: you wander, click on everything, combine odd objects, and chase small absurd tasks, with the occasional dead end that resets a sequence. Humour is constant and self-aware, full of pop-culture jokes, sendups of Star Trek-style space opera, and deadpan asides. Intensity is low: the mutants and alien menace are cartoonish, there is no gore or sexual content, and the frequent comic deaths are played for laughs rather than dread. Written for players who enjoy old-school point-and-click puzzles, sly parody, and a lighthearted hero who never takes himself seriously.
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