The Desolate Hope
The Desolate Hope mixes several gameplay styles. On the station and in the simulations, the game is a platformer. You shoot enemies, collect powerups and bits (money), and improve yourself and your virtual fighters. When you enter a mini-simulation (the old arcade screens), the game becomes an 8-bit overhead dungeon crawler. There you can farm money and get options to customize your combat experience. When you encounter a virus boss, the game switches to a JRPG-style battle where you have to use the mouse to choose from different options to defeat your opponent. Outside of these battles, almost everything revolves around improving your abilities and increasing your stats for these battles - they are the game's true challenge.
Story
On the distant edge of an unknown planet, an abandoned building stands in silence. The Lun Infinus station was built by an unmanned research vessel sent from Earth. It was to run simulations for five years to explore the possibilities of human colonization in the event that Earth became uninhabitable. The project was developed in an age of ambition and wealth, but was quickly abandoned when interest waned in the following years. The last transmission from Earth took place more than thirty years ago. The Lun Infinus station housed five sentient computers, the Derelicts, built to have a degree of mobility in the event of an emergency or the need to relocate. Each of these Derelicts was supposed to create its own plan for colonization based on thousands of hours of simulations. Over time, however, the simulations have become very elaborate and bizarre. In the meantime, a mysterious computer virus has emerged. The virus of unknown origin has slowly infested the Derelicts. As a result, more and more computing power is needed to fight the virus, leaving less energy for the simulations. Coffee is the station's last mobile resident, a small service robot who spends his days helping the station and the Derelicts carry out their daily tasks. With CPU power at a premium, Coffee has been looking for ways to get around the virus. Using small subsystems and less important CPUs scattered around the station, Coffee has developed a series of digital helpers, which he simply calls D-Co or "Digital Counterpart," to assist him in fighting the virus and keeping the station running. Eventually, the virus kills each D-Co, and Coffee tries to develop an improved D-Co with a different CPU. The latest is D-Co 9, built with code from a simple computer game. Coffee uses his own CPU for the main simulations, leaving D-Co to move his body around the station, take care of the Derelicts' needs and fend off virus attacks when they occur.