Story

Next Space does not begin with an explosion or a space battle. It begins with a loud phone call.

In the Czech version of the game, the opening shows a caption reading “Země, leden 2048” (“Earth, January 2048”), so we even know when we are: January 2048. Frank, a pilot and courier, is coming round after a night he would rather not talk about. The Boss starts on him straight away from a screen on the wall, and not kindly: “Listen, you drunk, that’s not what we agreed on!” Frank should have been upstairs with the Boss long ago. He should have finished the job even longer ago. And the Boss’s logic is relentless: “A job for today gets done today! A job from three days ago should’ve been done three days ago!!” In his view, Frank looks like a ploughed-up mouse.

The office on the station

Frank therefore heads off to see the Boss. A short film takes us to an orbital station near Earth and then into an office with a view straight out into space. The Boss, whom the game never names, is the kind of man who never asks whether it is a good moment. Frank tries to plead with him: “Could you talk a little quieter? I have a terrible headache. I’ve had a rough week.”

The answer is a list of Frank’s sins. Once he flew off with Vice President Willson’s children in the crates instead of the waste. Another time he mistook radioactive CX2 for a delivery of provisions for Space 34. The Boss hushed it all up. If it were not for Frank’s parents, he would send him straight to the uranium mines. “All you care about is women and booze.”

In the middle of the sermon an enraged voice comes over the screen: ”…Astrud deBurgh speaking. I’ve been stuck on Penclen for ages!” He threatens to tear everyone apart with his teeth and finally adds: “I’ll tell my dad!” The Boss apologises to him and then remembers why he called Frank in the first place: this rich, puffed-up passenger is exactly who Frank has to fly. No stops, no delays.

“Promise me nothing unexpected will happen.” “Sure, boss.”

The first sentence sounds like an order. The second like a promise. Neither lasts even ten minutes.

I’ll fly wherever I like

From the cockpit of Frank’s ship you can see mostly two tall red pillars and, between them, a panel with blinking lights. The Boss is on the radio and will not let up. “Frank! Still not over that hangover? Can’t you see how you’re flying?”

Frank has an answer of his own: “I’ll make it, I’m heading straight there. Don’t worry, no side trips planned. But I’ll fly wherever I like.” The Boss tries to finish his sentence. Frank says “I’m not listening to this” and switches him off.

Space takes care of the rest. A tunnel opens in front of the ship. A long animation carries him through a wormhole, and when it ends, Frank takes it surprisingly calmly: “What was that all about? Damn, it looked like some kind of virtual ride!”

“People only ever talked about tunnels like that.”

Frank looks at the map: “This is a completely different map.” There are asteroids galore. He picks an object on the map, says “Here we go”, and moments later he is coming in to land at a station nobody back home has ever heard of.

Until now Frank has only been listening. The player takes control only once he is outside the bar.

In front of Frank stands a rusty station, with a pink neon sign pulsing above the door. No town, no reception desk, just a button on the wall. Frank cannot help himself and presses it. The door opens and he finds himself in an entrance hall where two ladies are sitting. Frank, who has never been able to resist, asks out loud: “May I sit with you, lovely ladies?”

The ladies are, shall we say, all too accommodating. “Hey there, boy. How are you? Want some company?” Frank declines politely: “Look, girls, I really appreciate it, but maybe some other time.” The reply sounds more like a threat: “We’ll be waiting. Drop by.”

The Barman who doesn’t know where “lower” is

In the main room, an odd crowd of patrons sits at round tables. Three men just mumble (according to the barman, they are miners from a nearby asteroid, where they mine a shiny, heavy, soft metal used for making toilets), one patron drinks non-stop, and behind the bar stands the Barman. “Everybody here calls me Barman, no idea why,” he says by way of introduction. He hands Frank a translator so that they can understand each other. The translator, however, as Frank later remarks, “really is getting old”.

The result is one of the strangest conversations in the game. Frank asks where he is and gets answers that would hold their own in any collection of absurd dialogues: “Around here everything is like over there.” “After all, everything around is this. Even if it’s all in that.” Frank finally gives up and says it plainly: “As in every proper space adventure, I assume I’ve ended up in another universe or another dimension.”

At last he learns what really matters. Before their time, a lost civilisation lived here, one that built spatial gates and used them to travel to distant corners of space. One of them also led to the planet the barman calls Sen (“dream” in Slovak and Czech): the third of nine, one sun. It is our Earth, Frank’s home, and the name is a deliberate play on words, as Peter Hegyi confirmed. The whole galaxy is cut off from the rest of the world, and nobody knows where the gates are any more. When Frank says he was at home only an hour ago, the barman cannot believe his ears: “I must be dreaming.”

What people talk about at the bar

• About G-HERN. “True, he’s wrecked quite a bit here, but I like seeing him. At least I’m never bored.”
• About women. The Barman warns Frank: “Just blow them off.” There are stories going round about them. Most are made up, but better safe than sorry.
• About Viktor. The sad man at the table has lost a pet that started eating tiny critters, grew enormous and disappeared.
• About fish. The barman asks Frank whether he is “Dolphin or a friend of his”. Dolphin, apparently, was here a few times, and one day took his little net, said “So long, and thanks for all the fish” and vanished. It is a deliberate reference to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, as Peter Hegyi confirmed. In the same spirit, Frank asks what kind of station this is: “life, the universe and everything”.
• About the game itself. The Barman tells of a patron who claimed that someone was controlling him. “He says they control his words too. They pick his sentences. Total nonsense.” The player, who is choosing Frank’s lines at that very moment, may well crack a smile.

The barman’s last piece of advice comes without much enthusiasm: “Then there’s P.S.A.B. Mostly greenhouses and artificial biospheres. The rich have their estates there.” Frank picks out the landing pad outside the bar and sets off.

Frank sets off for the planet the barman told him about. An animation shows the station with the bar drifting away, and then comes the first bad idea: landing. The autopilot decides for him and the instruments fail. The ship shoots between rocks and ends up nose-first in a glass building: the PSAB greenhouse. (This is how Frank himself later tells the story to the barman.)

“I… I… I’m alive. It’s a miracle.”

“Looks like I landed in somebody’s living room or garden,” Frank goes on. The ship is stuck four metres above the ground, damaged beyond repair. The air outside is toxic, and only yellow foam in the broken windows keeps it out. The foam hardens, and suddenly it gives him a rope and glass and, before long, his first sword: a glass point and a foam hilt.

Acid instead of coffee

The surrounding greenery is beautiful and unpleasant. One flower drips something that hisses on the ground. Frank scoops the acid into a leaf and dips the sword into the rest. “The cocktail is mine.” A sword dipped in acid is the first real weapon he has in the game. Frank, however, does not look particularly pleased about it. “I’m not a vandal,” he repeats on several occasions.

By the waterfall he finds some wood, and something heavy glints in the water. “What a shiny, heavy stone… could it be gold?!” The giant creature sitting on a framework of poles backs away from the acid. Frank uses the stone for another trick: a metal pole falls out of the framework, and with it a grille can be prised off a small fan.

Fruit, a little creature and one treacherous cave

The greenhouse is full of nooks:

• Greenhouse with the Apple. A small tree with fruit that looks like a cross between a strawberry and an apple. Frank picks two and immediately uses them as bait.
• Cave of the Carnivorous Flowers. “A nice big open flower.” Frank could die in there, and the game lets him. Anyone who gets close to the wrong flower ends up in a short 3D animation and then on a skull screen.
• The little creature. The little thing is bored and ignores Frank: “It’s definitely ignoring me.” The fruit, however, wins it over, and the creature dashes into the fan, which hides a sharp horn. A little further on, Frank finds it in the control room and takes it with him: “I’ve got the creature in my pocket.”

The greenhouse control room is locked. Frank drips acid onto the panel: “Something crackled in the control panel.” Then he sets to work with the iron pole, and the door opens.

The hangar and the bomb that doesn’t tick

Beyond the door is a hangar with a ship that is “probably waiting for me”. In a small box there are electric wires and something else, which Frank first describes like this: “But… what else is this? Phew, it’s not ticking. But it’s probably a bomb.” “Not that I’m the destructive type, but this will definitely come in handy.”

Frank climbs the steps into the cockpit of the alien ship, finds a map on the navigation computer’s display and clicks on the bar. A short animation shows the ship leaving the planet, and moments later Frank is back outside the bar.

Frank arrives back outside the bar and finds that something inside has changed in the meantime. Through the huge window he can see that new guests have burst into the main room, guests who do not drink, do not speak politely and have no intention of paying. They are G-HERN’s people, and they are allowed almost anything.

A party on orders

Frank can only watch the conversation between the barman and G-HERN’s man from behind the glass. The intruder keeps it brief: “We’ll hold a private party here and you’ll get it back.” The barman objects that this really isn’t possible. The answer is short: “Shut up.” Then he adds that G-HERN has “picked your little dive” and that the barman should take it as an honour.

The order is clear: “The only answer you have a right to is Yes, sir. Now kick them out.”

Frank is carrying the things he picked up in the greenhouse: explosives, wires and a horn. And above the door of the airlock hangs an enormous “hammer”. As Frank learns, it is a safety flap that seals the door in an emergency.

A trap made of three things

The bomb sticks magnetically to the hammer. The horn fits into the hole for the detonator. The wires lead to the fuse box. Frank connects the last wire and the explosion buries the intruders.

The barman comes out of the main room and thanks him: “I truly appreciate what you did.” Frank immediately brushes it off: “Look, don’t overdo it. I hate talk like that.” But the barman has already made up his mind. He will throw a party in Frank’s honour and nobody will have to pay: “Drinks are free. You saved my bar, after all.”

The party

At one table sits Viktor with his depression. At another sit the androids, who never miss an opportunity: “How about right now? My pulse is already racing.” Frank squirms. “I’ll think about it.”

The conversation turns to the things people talk about at parties like this. The barman pulls out a forbidden bottle and reveals its name: Black Death. “It packs a real punch.” Then he asks how people drink back where Frank comes from. Frank replies that it’s all fine, except that the bosses don’t tolerate it. “Same as here,” the barman replies. “We all drink, whenever possible.” This leads to the profound thought of the evening: life is best without bosses.

Then comes the joke. Frank tells a story about a bear who banned alcohol in the forest, and a hare who drank in spite of the ban and eventually hid from the bear underwater, breathing through a bamboo reed. When the bear pulled him out, the hare said: “You may be the boss of the forest, but leave us fish alone!!” The guests do not understand a word. What is a bear? What is a hare? And what is a Fish who “wants some peace”? The translator stays silent, and one of the guests says what everyone is thinking: “Maybe the translator really is getting old.”

Falling asleep is easy

The evening drags on. Voices crack, sentences pass each other by and “I think enough has been drunk today”. Frank falls asleep. The game then takes away control for a while. Black space follows, then the narrator’s text (“Soon you fell asleep, and hours later you woke up… somewhere else, on another planet?!”) and a quiet animation of the sun.

Mornings after a party can be rough. This is the morning after a party on planet Zero.

Frank opens his eyes in a blue bedroom with a red bed and flowers in a pot. His hands are empty, and so are his pockets. The iron bar, the wooden stick, the sword dipped in acid and the grille are all gone, everything he picked up along the way. All he has left is a lighter.

A woman’s voice comes from the corner: “Well, look at that. Our little pet is up.” Frank is confused. “What’s going on? Where am I?” The reply is encouraging: “Calm down. You’re in good hands. My sister and I liked you at first sight. We’ve decided you’ll stay here with us.”

Hostesses with a plan

The hostesses are androids, and they have plans for Frank. He will be the man of the house, look after them and do whatever they want: “You do what I want, because you’re my slave.” Frank tries diplomacy. Not that he’s a racist, but he has never slept with a machine. The android is unabashed: “In the last century alone about 10 guys have kicked it here. But try hard and we might replace a few of your parts.”

The game changes here. So far Frank has only run around rooms collecting things. Now he has to escape from one of them and survive two hostesses who are, by their own account, seven times more powerful than a human being.

King of order and cleanliness

The flat’s third resident is the Cleaning Robot, who voices his hatred of mess in words that would not be out of place in a philosophy textbook. “It’s nothing but dirt and mess here.” According to him, the two sisters “can only throw things around and make a mess”. When Frank asks what he actually is, he answers matter-of-factly: “I’m a machine, a lifeless mechanism. Didn’t you notice?”

He would love to shove the androids into the cleaner. Frank would love to leave. The two goals fit together nicely. The robot is troubled by a creature that has settled in the kitchenette and spreads dirt around: “I can’t catch it. It’s a pest.” Frank offers to help and gets to work in three places at once.

• In the kitchenette he builds a trap from a bucket, chips as bait, a stick and a plastic bag. The result is a snake in a sack.
• In the corridor he prises off the grille with the stick and cuts the wires with the knife, causing a short circuit.
• In the closet he slips the robot the bag with the snake.

While cleaning, the robot smashes an antique couch, and the androids go berserk: “You nasty brute! What did you do?”

A deal is a deal

The androids send the robot to fix the short circuit. He catches Frank with his toolkit: “You stole my toolkit again. Real subtle.” Frank claims he wanted to fix something for them, and gets the reply: “You idiot! Get out of here!!” Then the robot turns on the androids: “I told you long ago I won’t tolerate any dirt. You look awful again. I won’t let this slide. Off to the cleaner, at once!”

And he marches them off. Frank picks the toolkit up off the floor, goes back to the television and takes the remote control that nobody is guarding any more. In the corridor he uses it to open the door: “The way to freedom is open.”

The toolkit is a small multi-purpose tool. A double-click in the inventory turns the repair tool into a painting tool, and that one into a milling tool. The last of these will get its chance in the hotel corridor.

The door to freedom leads into a hotel corridor. In front of Frank is a glass elevator shaft; on the wall there is a moving painting and a panel of buttons. One of them reads Level .ROOF. Up there, somewhere on the roof, his ship is parked.

Frank studies the painting. “I hate this kind of art, but I’m a stranger here, so I won’t play the vandal like I do back home.” Then he notices the elevator door. “The edge of the door is sharp as my wife’s tongue.” And a rather unfriendly plan begins to take shape in his head.

The guardian of the roof

The elevator carries him up. The roof is a landing pad under a starry sky. The Guard Robot is waiting there, laser beams stretch between him and Frank’s ship, and nearby is a control post with a palm sensor.

The dialogue that follows is one of the longest in the game. The robot is not authorised to let anyone through, and he is proud of it.

“Look, I don’t know who you are, but you’re obviously not allowed through here!” “Sure I am, I’m just new here.” “And new what, exactly?”

Frank tries everything. That he is the new guard robot and has come to relieve him. That he’ll pay him. That they can play a game of riddles and whoever loses goes away. The robot won’t budge: “I’m incorruptible, uncompromising and totally unpredictable. Two plus two is four.”

The sensor needs the fingerprints of the right hand. “Obviously my hand means nothing to the sensor. I should talk somebody into lending me theirs.” The idea gives Frank pause: “I don’t have webbing between my fingers, and I don’t need any more fingers.”

A hand without an owner

The solution comes in the hotel corridor. An android stops Frank and orders him to come back. Frank presses the elevator button, the doors close, and their sharpened edge cuts the android’s hand off. Frank remarks: “The door cut off an android’s hand. So I took it.”

Frank returns to the roof and tries the hand on the sensor. “This hand might just work.” The Guard Robot, however, has doubts about where it came from, and a conversation follows that cannot be quoted in full. The robot asks where the hand is from. Frank answers that he got it in a little shop. That it has been his for half a year. That the androids didn’t need it. The robot is disgusted: “But that’s disgusting. And you claim to be human!” And he has no intention of recognising any hand.

Fire downstairs

Frank heads for level P. There he finds a laundry with containers and a waste disintegrator that looks like a washing machine, with a robot hanging above it. He is not in a good mood: “Feels like I know you from somewhere. What’s with this getup?” He has nothing good to say about the androids: “They wanted to kill me, but not take my life, because I don’t have one. That’s logical.”

Frank throws a fire extinguisher into the disintegrator. The explosion flings the robot out, and the laundry really is on fire. Frank just smiles: “I hope he keeps his promise and takes revenge on the android women.”

Then comes the real trick. Frank goes back to the roof and tells the guard robot: “I came to tell you there’s a fire downstairs. You should go take care of it!” The robot suspects a trick. “So how do you tell there’s a fire?” he asks himself, and finally admits: “True, I actually can’t tell the difference!” The guard sets off to check the alarm, Frank walks him to the elevator and returns upstairs alone.

The laser beams go out. Frank puts the hand into the sensor and steps towards his own ship.

“My favorite rocket. My rocket.”

An animation shows the take-off. Once he has taken off, however, the game takes away his things: the hand, the knife, the remote control, the chewing gum and the milling tool. He won’t need them any more. Frank lands back at the bar, where new problems await him.

Hotel roof, take-off, landing. Frank is back outside the bar, but this time with empty pockets. The game has taken away everything he got from the androids.

The door opens at the touch of a button, but someone is already standing in the entrance hall, talking to the barman. He isn’t drinking, isn’t ordering, isn’t laughing. He is interrogating.

The interrogation

The guest is paranoid and, by all appearances, dangerous. “You must be the new guy, right?” he greets Frank. Frank makes his excuses: “Pardon me, I must have the wrong door.” It doesn’t work. The guest turns back to the barman and asks what happened to his man. “You eliminated my man.”

The barman defends himself with everything he has. “I had nothing to do with it! I was just curious whether you had a man.” The guest isn’t thrown: “I have lots of men.” The barman shoots back: “Then you don’t know squat!” And immediately adds: “Why don’t you leave him alone? He’s my guest!”

Frank tries to help. “I’ve only known the Barman a short while. We just chatted a bit here and that was all.” The guest laughs, not very cheerfully: “And that’s exactly what’s weird! You two agree on everything, … and you SUPPOSEDLY barely know each other.” He also mentions that he has heard about some stranger.

The barman lies for as long as he can. “He was here. But then he left and I haven’t seen him since.” The guest isn’t buying it. “You two are weird. Barman, you could never be trusted!”

“Frank! … jump into the teleporter, quick! Move it!”

The barman literally kicks him into the circle of light in the corner of the hall, and the guest roars: “What have you done?! You’ll pay for this!!” Frank doesn’t wait around. The teleporter carries him to an unknown place.

“What was that? That’s a real teleporter!”

The teleporter dumps him on an ice-blue planet full of pillars that look like anthills. In the corner stands a device that reminds Frank of a machine for making bathtubs. A caption flashes up on the screen, “A little later”, and a moment after that Frank is fighting his way through wrecked teleporters.

In the warehouse there are three broken teleporters with red cables hanging out of them. One of them is “the only partly working teleporter”. Inside its panel is a broken card with a piece snapped off, and the teleporter won’t work without it. Frank picks up a syringe that is “waiting for me” and climbs a sloping wall into the next room.

Creatures from the water

Small water creatures live in the pool (they call themselves the Nypr; Nyprovia in the Slovak original), and the first time they meet him, they flee. “Hey, I’m not going to hurt you,” he calls. “Wait. I just need some help.”

When he comes back to them, they have found their courage. “You must be him, the famous rescuer. Right?” Frank, who has done nothing at all, replies: “Now that you mention it, that would be me.”

They tell him their story. They came here with the waste several years ago and rather liked the place. That is, until a “six-legged beast” moved in. The creature makes a sticky slime that flows down into the pool and pollutes it. They can live only in clean water, and the pump is broken. “That’s our existential problem.”

Frank promises to help. “I don’t guarantee the result.” The pump needs a hose, a filter, a battery, a motor and energy. Meanwhile, the teleporter card turns up of its own accord.

Collecting five things

• The hose and the filter he finds in the industrial shaft. The filter is in a tube that can be opened.
• The battery is in the drawer of a cabinet in the spider’s nest.
• The motor is in the technical shaft. Frank has to undo four screws to get it out.
• The energy is in a small tube, from which he draws the liquid with the syringe.

But the way to the motor is covered by an armoured lid. Frank has to go back to the laser cannon, connect the battery to the cabinet with the wires and press the red button. “Awesome… a laser cannon!!!” A hole is blasted in the lid and the way down is clear.

The cocoon

The spider’s nest is no place for a stroll. Frank barely gets near the green pond before the spider catches him. “What, am I dead already? No. Pointless relief. I’m stuck in some kind of web. And I can’t move! Now I finally understand flies.”

Luckily, Frank has a lighter. “Whoever invented the lighter is a genius.” The web burns away and Frank is free. He also frees another water creature hanging in the neighbouring cocoon, knocks over the poles so the green mass stops flowing, and makes a path of ash across the sludge. “My brilliant path of ash.” The rescued creature also introduces itself to Frank: “We’re the Nypr. Nothing special.”

The pump

When all the parts are together, the pump works: “The pump is ready to run now.”

The water creatures show their gratitude: “I want to thank you on behalf of all of us for building us that filter system.” Frank answers honestly: “But I didn’t know… I was just bored, trying to put this pump machine together…” The creatures know what he needs: a working teleporter card. “We just found that card of yours.”

Frank inserts the working card into the panel, and the teleporter back to the bar is repaired.

Frank steps out of the teleporter into the bar’s entrance hall and breathes a sigh of relief: “It’s a dream. Finally back at the Bar. …my favorite…”

The silence, though, is not a good sign. The bar is empty. The Barman stands at the counter, frozen in a transparent cube.

“Uh-oh. The barman must be asleep. Still, I don’t envy him. What’s that stuff? Looks like ice, but it’s more like glass. Some weird plastic. Would be nice for the boss…”

When Frank speaks to the Barman through the glass, there is no answer. “We won’t be having much of a chat through that glass.”

Shopping without money

Time to look around for anything that might come in useful.

• Spilled biscuits in the entrance hall: “I might get hungry before evening. I’ll take these.”
• A box of sleeping pills on the shelf: “I took a few of them.”
• A handkerchief draped over the bench: “And now I have a new handkerchief.”
• A snipping tool behind the counter (in the Slovak version a “cvikač”, in the Czech version a “cvakač”).

Frank doesn’t take everything. “I can’t just take everything I fancy. I wouldn’t be able to carry it all before long.” And when he looks at the bottle, he says: “I’m not in the mood for booze right now.”

All of these things come in handy later: the biscuit lures the ants away, the pills put them to sleep, the handkerchief gets used in the process, and the snips are used to cut off a barrel. The journey continues by teleporter, back underground.

Once again the teleporter drops him in the cave with the pillars. Now Frank knows where to go and, above all, what he is carrying. He throws the biscuit towards one of the anthills, and the smelly heap that has been blocking the channel promptly sets off on an outing: “Brilliant idea. The stinking pile couldn’t resist the smell and went off to look for it.” The channel is clear.

The anthill and the fan

Beyond the channel stands a huge fan, and next to it a fast-asleep anthill. “A really big fan. Even from a distance it looks pretty dangerous.” You can walk into the fan. The first time, Frank refuses; the second time, the game ends with a short 3D animation and a skull. The right solution is quieter: sleeping pills over the anthill. “What’s the point of scattering pills over an anthill?” Frank asks, but it works. The ants fall asleep and the Helper Robot can be lifted out of the nest.

It is a small, flattened robot. Frank only attaches the magnet to it later.

The sewer

A ladder leads into the dark. It stinks, a thick liquid flows down there, and one pillar holds up the whole ceiling. Frank takes the hard stick and goes on. Beside the sewer there are barrels attached to a pipe. “A barrel originally meant for something other than sailing through a sewer.” The snips cut it free, the pole serves as a rudder, and the barrel sets off along the sewer to the next section.

Anyone who doesn’t use the pole on the barrel falls off, and the sewer takes care of the rest. “Good God, what’s going on? I don’t like this at all.”

In the next room there is steam, blood on the floor, and a man lying somewhere nearby.

Viktor

It is Viktor. The same man who was grieving for his little pet at the bar. “Hi Frank, I really wasn’t expecting you. But you have no idea how glad I am that you’re here.” Viktor has found his darling. “I kind of messed it up.” The darling has meanwhile turned into a monster and taken a piece of Viktor’s life. Viktor has paid it back in kind: he cut off one of the monster’s tentacles, and it now lies on the ground. “A bloody tentacle that the guy cut off of something,” Frank remarks. “If this keeps up, we’ll suck the life out of each other until one of us takes the last little bit from the other.”

Viktor still speaks of the creature fondly. “And he was so adorable once, like a kid peeing on your carpet.” Frank listens, and Viktor asks him for just one thing: the medkit he left upstairs in the factory storeroom. “Go get that medikit, please. Don’t waste time.”

The factory

The way to the storeroom is full of traps. With the severed tentacle, Frank lures out a monster that smashes a wall and uncovers a dark hole. With a brush he scoops Vaseline out of a broken pipe. With the pole he prises out a plug. In the factory he smears a machine with Vaseline, and in the wreckage he finds a crystal that starts the conveyor belt. Whoever steps onto the belt too early never gets off again.

In the storeroom he finds a meditrans amulet, “this must be the medikit”, and a magnet that gets attached to the Helper Robot. “I’m taking it for you, Viktor. You’re a lucky man.”

Too late

Frank returns along the sewer looking for Viktor. When he arrives, Viktor is no longer alive.

“Dear Viktor, I didn’t know you long, but I think you were a good guy. So I believe you’re better off now. You left early. Most of my friends do. Soon it might be my turn.”

The medkit stays in his inventory, and Frank returns through the factory and the teleporter to the bar. He takes the Helper Robot, magnet attached, with him.

Frank comes back up from underground with an amulet that can no longer help anyone, and with a plan. At the window of the entrance hall he notices something he had overlooked until now. Outside, on the floor of the station, lies a firearm. “Who might have left it there?” But: “There’s no atmosphere outside right now.” So he had better stay inside.

He does, however, have the Helper Robot. Frank fixes a magnet to it. “I fixed a magnet onto the robot.” Then he opens the outer door for the robot, which sets off to fetch the weapon. “Go and carry out your mission.” The robot brings the gun back. “Aaa, the super robot brought me a gun.”

The sensor, the glass and the green button

The weapon comes in handy at the door leading onward from the bar. A sensor above it decides who gets in. Frank has examined it before: “I’ll teach you, you sensor!” Now he has something to shoot it with. The door opens and Frank breathes a sigh of relief: “Fine, I can finally move on.”

Beyond it lies a V-shaped glass corridor with light panels and a control panel. Frank notices a green button: “I can try pressing it.” He would love to smash the glass door, but in the end he doesn’t use the gun. “I’m no gunslinger,” he says. “I can’t always be the hooligan, the bad guy!” The door is opened from the control panel, and behind it is a cold room full of transparent cubes.

Next to the frozen cubes lies some kind of tool. “Since it’s lying next to the frozen cubes, it’s probably a defroster.” Frank takes it and goes back to the barman.

The drained defroster

He tries it: “I’ll try thawing something.” There is just one problem. “The defroster is out of power.”

The charger is somewhere in the factory. So Frank goes back underground, finds a device on a wall, puts the drained defroster on it and comes back a little later. “It’s charged now. I work miracles while you wait.”

The barman lives

Frank aims the defroster at a cube. The cube vanishes and the barman comes to life. “Finally, I thought I’d be stuck here forever. How did you manage to fix it?” “I charged it.” “Ah.”

The barman explains what happened. He kicked Frank into the teleporter along with the card, G-HERN got angry and froze him. “How long has it been?” he asks. Frank jokingly says it has been two years, and the barman sees through him: “What are you babbling about, you look exactly the same!” So Frank admits it has been only two days. And that in the meantime he has made some friends: “Little critters. They helped me get out of there.”

The barman is worried about his bar. “As you see, G-HERN chased all my customers out of here and business is in the dumps.” Then Frank speaks up: “You know, I had an idea, but I don’t know if you’ll like it.” “Don’t keep me in suspense,” says the barman. So it is Frank who proposes the trip to Earth, and the barman accepts at once:

Frank: “I could show you my home planet EARTH. There’s a ton of interesting stuff there and you look almost the same as Earthlings, so you’d be totally inconspicuous.” Barman: “That’s an excellent idea. Best if we set off right away. I hope you remember the way.” Frank: “You bet.”

The ship detaches from the station. They head towards Earth, but they won’t get far.

Their ship is headed for Earth, but it never reaches its destination. G-HERN’s ship intercepts it, and moments later Frank and the barman are standing on the command bridge of the station that G-HERN has taken over. G-HERN himself stands before them.

The first interrogation

G-HERN greets the barman like an old acquaintance. “So we meet again. Under slightly different circumstances now. Though once again we stand on opposite shores.” The barman gives as good as he gets: “Yes, we do. But now you’re the stranger here. And uninvited.”

Then G-HERN turns on Frank. Frank asks him how he found the wormhole that nobody had found for so many years. “Why you, of all people?” G-HERN answers: “Somebody had to find it sometime. The universe’s programmers were kind to me that day.” When Frank asks how he knew where to look, all he gets is: “I’ll keep that to myself, understood?”

Then he lays his cards on the table. He wants to come to an agreement with this base. The barman wonders how he intends to negotiate with an inanimate object, and G-HERN replies: “You two are alive for now, and if we don’t reach an agreement, you’ll end up exactly like this base.” Frank is to explain to the people on the station that G-HERN comes in peace. “Explain we need this base. Tell them not to be afraid, we’re not animals.”

“I won’t do that, though.” “I don’t like this. Don’t play games with me.”

The conversation goes nowhere. Both prisoners end up in a cell.

The cell

The cell is a room with a force field, an octagonal table, a monitor and an unpleasant painting. “This painting has gotten on my nerves from the start. Those colors, that execution.” The barman tries to come up with a plan, but Frank needs to nip to the toilet instead. And so begins one of the game’s running gags.

The guard at the cell takes his job very seriously: “I’m not here for fun, I’m here to guard, so leave me alone.” Pleading gets Frank nowhere. The guard makes threats. “Fine, but the moment I notice any sudden movement, or you try anything, I shoot right away.” Frank keeps asking to use the toilet, and after each return the guard wonders aloud: “I hope you didn’t do anything in there.”

The plan takes shape in the toilet. Behind the mirror is a small ventilation shaft, and Frank pushes toilet paper into it, sprinkles it with cleaning powder and sets it alight. “I can’t stand it in here any longer!” He also pulls a lump of rubber out of the shaft and puts the mirror back in place. If he doesn’t put it back, the game ends in the bad ending (see the sidebar).

It seems the smoke and the smell travel through the ventilation shaft to the main corridor. The guard in the guardroom is put out of action and a remote control falls from his hand. “What luck, the remote control fell out of his hand.” Frank takes it: “Took the remote control. Smooth move!” The remote switches off the force field.

A plan and the first failures

The barman has a plan. The orbital station needs to be “mined”. But first they have to reach the docks. The route leads through green corridors and closed doors that are “allergic to me”. The barman tries to take a door apart. “Hey, leave me alone. I’ll finish this myself.” Then he remembers a hole meant for creatures smaller than a human and sends Frank to fetch the little creature that was left behind in the alien ship. “Hey, there’s a small hole up here. Why don’t you go get that little creature of yours?”

In the north corridor a robot walks about carrying a glass. Frank stretches the rubber across its path: “My perfect trap.” He drops sleeping pills into the glass the robot is carrying, and the robot becomes a drinks waiter. “A little delivery robot is a good thing.” The guards in the dock fall asleep. Frank lures the little creature out of the ship with a biscuit.

Then comes the twist: a guard spots Frank and locks him up. The game switches characters. From now on the player controls the barman.

The barman in uniform

The barman has to get to the cell – disguised as a guard. In the dock he drags the sleeping guard to the back: “I’ll drag him to the back.” And he borrows his uniform: “I could probably go pick up girls in this, right? Well, true. It’s a few sizes too big for me.” An inflating machine helps. “Great. I’ll fit right in with them. Not even my own mother would recognize me.”

In uniform he arrives at the cell and announces to the guard: “I came to relieve you.” The guard is persuaded and leaves, handing the remote control to the barman, and Frank is free.

Doors and ships

The little creature removes the last obstacle. It passes through the hole and opens the door from the inside. Beyond it is a dock with ships. The barman steps away: “I’ve been looking forward to this. Wait here a moment, I’ll nail this fast. And don’t worry.” And after a while: “That’s it. Beautiful.”

“I broke their speed controls, so the ship will take them somewhere really far away. Come on, let’s get in our ship and lure them in!”

Frank looks at the barman and simply asks: “What did you do to them?”

Frank and the barman board the ship and lure G-HERN out. The sabotage in the dock has done its job: G-HERN’s ships have faulty steering, and once they get moving, they cannot be stopped.

Ending A

The animation shows G-HERN’s ships accelerating sharply and, moments later, vanishing into space. Then the game cuts to a quiet scene with stars, and the narrator speaks.

“G-HERN vanished at tremendous speed, even from the telescopes’ view, into endless space. After a while, Earth’s response units reached the orbital station too. It was easy work. They quickly took the two remaining ships and disarmed the intruders still left. Without orders, those were like small children.”

The barman dropped Frank off at the next dock. They had to say goodbye quickly. The barman flew back to his own universe to warn the authorities, because G-HERN will stop somewhere one day and then turn back. He has influence in many corporations, and further reinforcements are gathering for him in outer space.

And Frank? “You stood gazing at distant stars. Suddenly they seemed within reach.” It occurs to him that Earth doesn’t actually know where G-HERN came from. “Unlikely they could.”

Ending B

Frank returns to the office where the story began. The Boss is already waiting for him, and his mood has not improved. “You brainless jerk. We had a deal! Where have you been all this time?”

Frank treads carefully: “Sir, I’m really sorry, but actually none of this is my fault.” The Boss responds sarcastically: “Of course it’s not your fault. Abducted by aliens? Or what?” Frank tries to explain what happened: “A few hours ago, part of this base was in the hands of certain people. And…” The Boss knows about the vandals. A special unit is flying in from Earth, so, as he sees it, it is none of their business. Frank objects that this is exactly what it has to do with. “Listen Frank, enough! You’re really starting to annoy me. Your imagination is dangerous.”

Then comes the question: “Now quick, where did you loaf around all week?” Frank takes a deep breath and tells the truth:

“I was just hanging around in bars.” “I’d never have thought that of you. You’re practically written off. I still don’t understand how you could do something like that.” “Me neither.”

The Boss gives him one last task: “Now you pack up and fly to Earth. I need one delivery handled fast. Then we’ll see what happens with you. Report to me tomorrow at this time. Get out!”

Frank gets out. The animation shows the blue planet he is flying towards. Then a black screen, the words THE END and the credits: the names of the people who made this game in 1997.

Two endings, one game

Here the game gives the player no choice. The player made the decisions that lead to this ending long ago: escaping from the cell, switching off the force field, replacing the guard and sabotaging the ships. That is why Ending A and Ending B play automatically, one after the other. They are two parts of one good ending.

Anyone who made a poor decision along the way will find their fate in a separate section: The Bad Ending and Seven Deaths.

There is only one good ending. Anyone who plays the game through correctly sees the Boss, the credits and the words THE END. Anyone who makes a mistake in the wrong place sees a skull. After each death a skull on a stone appears briefly and the game returns to the opening menu. Your saved game is waiting where you left it.

The bad ending: the mirror in the toilet

From the cell Frank gets to the toilet and finds a ventilation shaft behind the mirror. Once he has set it alight, he must put the mirror back in place. If he forgets and leaves, the guard realises that something is going on. “What’s going on over there? Damn! I told you something, you idiot.” Immediately after: “Shut up! I’m never letting you near a toilet again.” He locks Frank back up and the game goes on without him.

The game cuts to a quiet scene with stars, and the narrator pours out a long epilogue. It is an ending without Frank:

“And he really kept his word. It was torture and you had to really force yourself to endure…” “While you failed everyone and sat locked up, events sped on. G-HERN seized the whole orbital station by force, without serious incidents…”

What follows is a description of a war that could be summed up in one sentence: Earth built the strongest fleet in history, and G-HERN had an army gathered from the corners of the universe. “Fifty hours after mobilization, G-HERN opened the battle. First polite chatter and gentle fire, so no one suspected anything. Then it got serious.” The last quotable sentence: “A huge fleet of cruisers swarmed out of the wormhole at a leisurely pace…”

And that is the end. The game leaves the rest untold.

This epilogue does not appear in the longplay video, because the player in it finished the game without a single mistake. In the game files you will find it in room 51.

Seven ways to die

These are deliberate endings, not bugs: each has its own lines and sound. Two of them (the fan and the flower) even have their own 3D film, which a careful player never gets to see.