Babel

Babel is a 1997 work of interactive fiction by Ian Finley, packaged here as a self-contained Macintosh application requiring System 7 and 1.6 MB of free memory. The player wakes as an amnesiac inside Babel, an abandoned Arctic biological research facility, and recovers the story by touching glowing objects that replay scenes from the past.

Premise

The protagonist has no memory of who they are or why they are alone in a frozen, half-ruined complex. Exploration and a psychometric touch ability gradually reconstruct what happened to the staff of Babel.

Style

Babel is a parser-driven text adventure with a strong emphasis on atmosphere, character vignettes, and emotional pacing rather than puzzle density, and it became one of the better-known mid-1990s amateur IF works.

Macintosh packaging

This release wraps the story file with a Mac interpreter so it runs as a double-clickable application. Non-Mac players were directed to the GMD if-archive for alternate interpreters and source story files.

Distribution

The author distributed Babel as freeware and explicitly invited contact regarding CD-ROM compilations, which was typical of the late-1990s IF community ethos.