Mutasmagoria

You play as Annette Cylon, a sketalian girl who majored in Zoo and Wildlife Medicine.

Her interests in biology and the grades were outstanding, but she’s also going through a long-lasting melancholia and aimlessness. One day, her mother-side uncle, Seth Petrooth, offers her a job in his zoo, Buckloot Island Zoo - a resort-like place located in the middle of an archipelago. Annette wanted to do some busywork to divert herself from the crippling remorse, so she took the train to Buckloot Island. What she didn’t expect, however, was the train of agonizing misfortunes and man-made disasters rushing at her from far away.

The game’s central strengths can be written like this.

• Strong world building: The universe of Mutasmagoria is based on the speculative-evolution, where all the vertebrates evolved from a hexapedal fish-like ancestor, and two entirely different human species branched from them. Therefore, the nature and cultures there are also developed to be “alien but logical” from our perspective. This uneasy balance of alienation and familiarity drags the curiosity of the readers into this game.
• Mind Library: Annette has a *figurative* library in her head, and you can access there anytime, whenever you need the required information for this alien nature. Just like how the real-life library functions, you have all the information from the start, but you are not expected to acquire all the knowledge all at once. This sets the interesting puzzle situation where you dictate the pace of clue gathering, instead of the game gating the information.
• The puzzles built around the world: The questions that the game asks you are about how to cure the alien-like animals within the given resources. The information for animals is freely given for you, since you play as a biology major, but guessing the diagnosis, making the medicines, and preventing the unseen virus to stop a future catastrophe? That will require some critical thinking beyond searching the mind library. Every clue and solution will revolve around world-building and the in-game nature mechanisms.
• Time is ticking: The main mode of the game (without any difficulty modifications) will read your actions and move the timer forward. A set amount of tasks will be given for the day, and if you don’t finish them all in a day, something (mostly bad but sometimes goodish…?) will happen. This aspect will stack up till the end, and it will bring out multiple different conclusions for the story. And there are many “trap puzzles” that are designed to waste your time, so doing the 100% ideal scenario is borderline impossible without an extreme hunch of yours.