Plot
A hundred years after the arrival of colonists aboard the Snowball 9, planet Eden has become home to half a billion people. In this paradise managed by robots there is not any crime, taxes, unemployment, or freedom. The population lives in a domed “megapolis,” and perhaps due to the war that occurred during Return to Eden, there is not any contact between the cities and the surrounding natural world. The occasional sighting of flying saucers keeps the population afraid from going outside.
The main character, a nameless citizen of Enoch, starts the game in a beautiful garden where everything seems fine. He picks an apple from a tree, a worm pops out, and the player follows it outside the garden, through the desert, and then he awakens. It was only a simulation, one of the many forms of entertainment available during the reign of the third Kim. This “Garden of Eden as a prison” allegory sets the mood for the entire game. The objective is to explore the city, and while doing so the player must gather clues to unmask the government conspiracy behind the flying saucers.
Development
The Worm in Paradise is the third and final instalment of the Silicon Dreams trilogy and is a departure from the previous games. It “evolved alongside a 12 month enhancement on Level 9’s own adventure system. Standard features include a 1,000 word vocabulary, a very highly-advanced English input, memory-enhancing text compression, the now familiar and very much appreciated type-ahead, and multi-tasking so a player need never wait while a picture is drawn.” This was the first game using version 3 of the A-Code system. It was released for four fewer platforms, excluding the Lynx, Memotech MTX, Nascom and Oric-1 compared to the two previous releases.
Another difference is that the player has only seven days, within the game’s clock, to complete the game. Quests are also time-based and require that the player arrive at certain locations at specific hours to achieve the desired goal. And while game play remains the same, the backdrop is no longer an action adventure, but a political thriller that resembles the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Similar to what happened when Snowball was released, there was certain confusion about the main character’s identity and the time when the story is set. The Level 9 Fact Sheet says: “…a couple of years later, Kim Kimberley has become a legend on Eden.” Another article stated: “Worm in Paradise is set 100 years later. You are now Kim Kimberley III…” Furthermore, Pete Austin said, “Worm is set on Eden, about 50 years in the future” and “The player is not Kim – she becomes mayor and runs the place.” Notice that these sources termed the game by its original name, Worm in Paradise.