Back in the heyday of Sierra’s adventure games, there was the Space Quest series, featuring an intergalactic janitor named Roger Wilco. The series was more satirical than King’s Quest, less preachy than Police Quest, and not as adult as Leisure Suit Larry. It was created by Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe—a pair of developers who called themselves “The Two Guys from Andromeda”—and Space Quest was known for its humor, and there was a nice sense of progression throughout most of the series, with Roger Wilco rising from working-class spaceman to the boss of his own Star Trek ship.
Tachyon Dreams Anthology, a collection of three brief games previously released on Itch.io, clearly references Space Quest. Created by an independent dev Cosmic VoidAKA Aviv Salinas, each episode of Tachyon Dreams puts you in the shoes of an intergalactic dishwasher named Dodger, who’s almost like an alternate Roger Wilco if you squint. Dodger just chills on a spaceship, cleaning dishes as all the staff around him disappears, which is basically what happened to Roger at the beginning of Space Quest I. Guided by a sentient computer, Dodge must travel through time and space, and his mission eventually leads him on the trail of the Margdonians, a mysterious race that once farmed the galaxy.
The plot, which starts with time travel and ends with Dodger literally contemplating his past while sitting on a porcelain throne, doesn’t quite hit the mark of Space Quest. However, the game’s visuals are 100% reminiscent of Sierra’s lost 1987 adventure, created using the company’s then-famous AGI (Adventure Game Interpreter) engine. Even Dodger’s walk cycle mimics Roger Wilco’s, although Dodger is a few pixels larger than Roger ever was. I’m not sure if Tachyon Dreams Anthology was made in Studio AGIgame development software that is widely used among Sierra fans, but it certainly looks like it. Cosmic Void’s expert utilize of 16-color AGI is particularly impressive, and I really appreciate the pixelated representations of the galactic sky, swathed in pretty shades of blue and magenta. (Anyone who wants to see similar visuals in something that feels like a game from the ’90s rather than the ’80s should check out Twilight Oracle, one of Cosmic Void’s other projects. Alice B (RPS forever in peace) enjoyed the demo!)
Visuals aside, this is a parser game where you control Dodger with the arrow keys and type commands to make him do certain things. It takes a certain type of adventure gamer to appreciate this control scheme, but as someone who spent countless hours as a kid trying to figure out which Sierra games recognized which bad words, I like it. “Collect berries.” “Use the computer.” “Take your pants off.” (The last one doesn’t work.) Tachyon Dreams Anthology recognizes quite a few verbs, although in some cases you’ll run into a hellish puzzle that requires a very specific combination of commands. But getting stuck is the norm for Sierra-inspired adventure games, and in one case where I couldn’t figure out how to proceed, Cosmic Void was kind enough to answer my question via Twitter/X.
There are two minigames that break up the exploration and verb-typing. One is the obligatory “move the colored things until they match up” exercise, which I could do without, because I hate it when an adventure game forces you to sit down and solve a Rubik’s Cube before moving on. At least there’s nothing as annoying as the obligatory Astro Chicken game from Space Quest III, thankfully.
There’s also no death or dead ends in Tachyon Dreams Anthology, which is more of a page out of the LucasArts playbook than Sierra. I’m a bit of a two-bitty person when it comes to the lack of death in adventure games—I appreciate the lack of danger, but when I played Space Quests, some perverse part of me enjoyed seeing Roger Wilco die in all sorts of hilarious ways. I wanted Dodger to suffer ridiculous deaths as well, especially when going through the aforementioned section near the end of the game that involves a visit to the bathroom.
In addition to the lack of stupid deaths, Tachyon Dreams Anthology also lacks a truly coherent story, as I mentioned earlier. The game’s original episodes – Tachyon Dreams I: The Radiant Fish of the Apocalypse, Tachyon Dreams II: Inflated Can of Cosmic Root BeerAND Tachyon Dreams III: Rancid Buttermilk — have been spliced together with a smattering of extra screens, puzzles, and text descriptions that attempt to connect them. But the resulting product feels disjointed, as if you’re clearly jumping from what was supposed to be a bite-sized standalone game to another bite-sized standalone game that misremembered the plot of the first. For example, the flashy computer Dodger talks to in Part I unfortunately disappears in Part II, and the sudden deep dive into Dodger’s history with his ex in Part III comes out of nowhere. It was probably easier to justify these gaps when the episodes were released separately on Itch, but when you combine them, the structure feels flimsy.
Humor is at least interspersed with the cheesy, though it’s not as amusing as it initially seems. Tachyon Dreams Anthology can be very amusing, toeing the line between toilet humor and referring to Canada as a mysterious foreign country that makes art films, but huge parts of the game are actually quite grim. In fact, most of Tachyon Dreams has a lonely, introspective feel, with Dodger exploring mostly empty locations and pondering the nature of being a lone person trapped in the vacuum of space, following the lost tracks of long-dead aliens. Space Quests also had its surprisingly stern moments, especially in Space Quest IV: The Time Rippers, a personal favorite of mine, which saw Roger Wilco traveling through the past, present, and future. But Space Quest IV still offered a delicate touch with colorful descriptions of items and a wacky narrative courtesy of the slow, great Gary Owens. Tachyon Dreams Anthology lacks this, which is not a bad thing, but it ends up being a much more philosophical and calmer game than its promotional materials, promising a crazy 80s-style comedy, would suggest.
Ultimately, Tachyon Dreams Anthology reminds me of another Cosmic Void project I played, a first-person adventure game titled Bloody Nova it was pretty, but it had a lot of hints at grand space opera concepts that were never explored in a real way. Tachyon Dreams Anthology has a similar weirdness, flirting with a coherent story and sense of humor but not quite delivering what I was looking for in either area.
Still, it’s worth playing for fans of classic adventures, if only to see an independent developer passionately capture the spirit of Sierra’s past in a way that pays homage to Space Quest without being a Space Quest fan game. In a world where Space venturespiritual successor to Space Quest by the original Two Guys from Andromeda, crashed and burned in truly epic fashion, we could have used more games like Tachyon Dreams Anthology. I wouldn’t mind seeing more of Dodger – perhaps in a focused sequel where he abandons his dishwashing roots and embraces his destiny as an unassuming guardian of the galaxy like his grandfather Roger Wilco before him.
This review is based on a test version of the game provided by the game developer.
