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Video Game / Meat Puppet

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"We’ve been sent into the heart of industrial and political power for a reason. Look around you. These buildings hold the most precious secrets of human science, and the men who created them. The secrets they keep wash away their humanity. Who better than a woman to exhume their virtue, if any virtue remains in them at all? And if there is justice to be gained through wholesale manslaughter, we will find it here… then we are pawns no longer."
Dumaine

Poor Lotos. For a beautiful girl with a razor keen mind, she's having a hard time surviving the 21st century. These days, it seems everyone wants her dead and those that don't want her to kill everyone else.

You see, after answering a personal ad about “nocturnal missions”, Lotos was tricked into becoming a Meat Puppet, an assassin who’s kidnapped, genetically enhanced and forced into servitude by the faceless Puppet Master known as The Martinet. With every target a Puppet eliminates, their “Radio Cranial Link” will give them an electroconvulsive lobotomy, wiping all their most recent memories, and in the event they fail their mission, the RCL will terminate the Puppet by dissolving and mixing packs of explosive gel inside their colon. Luckily for Lotos, her Puppeteer, a digital ghost named Dumaine, sees her as an opportunity to obtain freedom for the both of them.

The Martinet has given Lotos a big task: to assassinate each of the corrupt ambassadors of the six embassies of Neoteric Los Angeles in one night...or be disposed of. With the clock ticking, Lotos sets out to complete her mission, while working in secret with Dumaine to find the identity of the Martinet…and kill them.

Meat Puppet is an isometric shooter developed by Kronos Digital Entertainment (later known for the Fear Effect series) and published by Playmates in 1997 for Microsoft Windows. Described by the developers as a cross between Blade Runner, Æon Flux and La Femme Nikita, the game is notable for its dark sense of humor, lovingly detailed cyberpunk world, over-the-top violence and an industrial soundtrack composed by the late Steve Henefin.

The game was considered abandonware for the longest time…until it got a surprise re-release in late 2022 on GOG and 2023 on Steam, courtesy of Piko Interactive.


This video game provides examples of:

  • All There in the Manual: The game’s manual and official website covers a lot of the game’s backstory, as well as offering more details about the various embassies and their leaders.
  • Cataclysm Backstory: According to the timeline in the manual, the formation of Neoteric Los Angeles is the result of a catastrophic earthquake known as “The Big One” which leveled most of the original Los Angeles, as well as San Francisco, Anchorage, Memphis, and Tokyo.
  • Swiss-Army Weapon: Lotos’s weapon, the “Triggermortis Readykill” can fire bullets, micro-missiles, fire, tranquilizer darts and nerve gas grenades.
  • Timed Mission: Since Lotos’s assignment is set over one night, each of the game’s missions has a time limit attached to them, and failing to complete the mission in the alloted time results in an instant game-over. These were later patched out after much backlash from both players and critics.

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