Silicon Dreams – Return to Eden

Plot

With the Snowball 9 orbiting Eden, the surviving crew members put Kim on trial. The only evidence against her is the “mempak” from the control room, which shows her as the hijacker rather than the saviour. Despite the fact that the recording is damaged and thus is unreliable, they sentence her to death. About to be thrown into space, Kim manages to escape aboard a “stratoglider” and an hour later, lands on Eden. At this point the game starts.

The first thing the player must do is find a shelter for Kim, because a few moves into the game the Snowball 9 crew use the ship’s engine to try to burn her down. The native robots take this as proof that the Snowball 9 is not the ship they were expecting but a hostile alien craft they must destroy. The objective is to contact the robots before time ends for the Snowball 9 and everyone aboard it.

Development

Unlike its predecessor, Return to Eden only had about two hundred and fifty locations, but it was Level 9’s first game to feature graphics.[5] Other adventure games had included graphics before, but version 2 of the A-Code system, allowed Level 9 to encode location graphics into as little as forty bytes. This size made it possible to add graphics to every location of the game for all formats with more than 32 K RAM. The user could choose not to display them and play the game in text-only mode. It was released for the same platforms as its predecessor.

The game’s first cover depicted a robot fighting a monster plant in Enoch. The robot resembled a comic book character, so to avoid legal troubles, Level 9 commissioned Godfrey Dowson to do a new cover. Dowson’s illustration depicted another robot in the jungle looking towards Enoch. Level 9 was not satisfied with the result and asked Dowson to do it again. They liked the third cover so much, they hired Dowson to do artwork for the re-release of their old games as well as for their future titles.

Pete Austin commented on the game: “It’s an alien theme park gone wild. The Eden universe is more like Larry Niven’s future space.” and “…is intended as a comment on superpower intervention in the Third World.”