The Umbra Conspiracy

The Umbra Conspiracy is a remake of Presumed Guilty!. The overall story (now set in 2006 instead of 1996) and the gameplay stays largely the same with an updated UI. The big new feature are live-action videos.

We write the year 2006. After the democratic revolution, Russia has transformed into a national autocracy and a war between them and NATO over Ukraine and the Baltic states is imminent. The player takes control over Sparrow, a new computer agent of the Umbra spy organization. First assigned to investigate a suspicious car accident, he soon becomes the prime suspect himself...

The gameplay is completely focused on the COPNET computer platform. Here the player receives video messages (which are transcribed for later access) and reads documents. There are three ways for interaction: using the phone, the research function or the datasphere. When using the research function, the player types in a topic or name which is then researched by the system and eventually brings up related documents. The datasphere is an AI which holds archived records (such as video messages) and is used to retrieve DNA from objects and compare them with other DNA. Additionally, the player may use it to analyze or compare documents to find discrepancies. Both research and datasphere actions are restricted to a few operations at the same time.