Spore

Spore is the hitherto unimagined mash-up of two seemingly irreconcilable and disparate video game genres: the text adventure game and the paddle-and-ball game. The player controls a space ranger of sorts who’s been sent to Earth’s colony planet, Spore, to investigate a distress signal sent from the now apparently deserted outpost. This barren landscape is navigated according to the standard conventions of homebrew interactive fiction: movement is dictated according to compass points and various inventory items are acquired to employ in the overcoming of small puzzles.