And due to the second hurdle, the difficulty, even easy will have you dying rather quickly during missions. Getting a “first view” of the opponent, giving you ample time to prepare for the oncoming barrage of bullets, is vital, making you sneak-click through the maze like mission environments. Though window drag and individual selection of your characters feels familiar, navigating point-and-click style through the multi-viewed environments, especially when in combat, can be very tricky. The mood is set and the intriguing backstory make you wonder where the story will go (you’ll have plenty of time for that during the overly long loading screens). When you’ve perused the different weird skills, selected two teammates and bought their load-out, you are out of funds and the mission begins. From here you’re introduced to the squad selector, swamping you with possible recruits, ranging from troopers with varying weapon proficiencies, to attack, defense and buff psychics. Joe gets the order to assemble a team and travel to the Topeca Kibbutz, to enlist a time-psi, with yet to be determined powers, by the name of Patricia Conley.
You explore the offices and interact with your colleagues, until you wander in on your boss and the scout GG Ashwood, discussing a new job. The game starts out like a point and click adventure, with impressive FMVs and nice pre-rendered backgrounds, with multiple angles per view and multiple views per room. And as the camera on Cryo’s logo zooms out and reveals itself to be Ella in her storage unit, effectively marrying both companies, it shows the trust they had in their production. She acts as an oracle from beyond the grave, guiding our heroes in their reality-bending profession. Joe’s boss, Glen Runciter, runs the company with Ella, his dead wife now in cold-pac, creating a half-life state making partial communication possible, if frozen fast enough, after death. It’s locked in a constant race with their nemesis company, Hollis Inc., in finding and securing the talents from an evergrowing pool of possible psionic powers. A technician for Runciter Associates, a company specializing in telepathic protection with anti-psi’s, agents able to negate others’ skills.
In a future where the dependence on technology, economic space colonization and emerging psychic powers have drastically altered the game of industrial espionage, we follow the perpetually broke Joe Chip. Dick’s Ubik is a headtrip of a novel, dealing with grand themes of reality, religion, identity and death, and the sci-fi framework wherein this philosophizing takes place is a perfect catalyst for them.
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