Sentient is a first-person adventure developed by Psygnosis and released on the PlayStation in 1997. It was also released for the PC the same year. Sentient's main feature is the artificial intelligence controlling multiple individual crew members aboard the station, each with their own assignments and behaviors. You interact with the AI characters through an elaborate parser interface, which allows you to ask them everything from the location of a vital piece of equipment, to their opinion of another member of the crew. To succeed, you must take advantage of the crew's help through this social system. Through interaction with more than 60 characters and exploration of 200 real-time rendered locations you need to try and save the ship, and yourself. The game automatically randomizes sub-plots so that it will be different every time you play.
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Reading a guide is just you being directed to different floors and rooms to talk with folk, and I don't see how you could know to do any of those unless you were hunting down every single NPC and asking every single iteration of dialogue options, which could take hours. Hours you don't have unless you want to do seventeen playthroughs.
I really liked the vibe of it all at the start, but it quickly became so frustrating to just interact with. A real shame, because I feel like some tweaking could have resulted in a wee hidden gem.
I will give it props though for the difficulty select screen. Three sliders.
Ship Simulator
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Disease Spread
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Respect for Player
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