Orion Burger

It was the company's second and final title not made for children, after The Riddle of Master Lu.

• Title — Orion Burger • Developer — Sanctuary Woods • Publisher — Eidos Interactive • Producer — François Robillard • Designer — Robert Aitken • Writer — Robert Aitken • Programmer — Matthew Powell Nick Porcino • Artist — Andrew Pratt • Composer — Darren McGraw • Released — 1996 • Genre — Adventure • Modes — Single-player • Platforms — MS-DOS, Macintosh

Orion Burger is vexed. Environmentalist pressure is threatening the company's pretense that it only uses unintelligent raw materials, forcing it to abduct pet shop assistant Wilbur Wafflemeier and test him for sentience before scouring his planet clean. The company is still brazen enough to rig the tests. Wilbur fails miserably. He is supposed to be returned to the moment he left and remember nothing, but the teleporter fails even worse. Wilbur arrives intact to a time one hour before his abduction, and can now cheat back.

Orion Burger has a mouse-driven interface with the commands "take", "use", and "talk". It features full voice-acting, which its Pelit review complimented, but which MikroBitti insulted. It also uses a variety of ambient background noises, but little music. Gameplay consists of wandering around Wilbur's hometown of Boonsville, solving puzzles to gather gear and information for the aliens' five tests. Wilbur is abducted at regular intervals, tested, and returned to Boonsville through the failing teleporter for another iteration of the loop. Going back in time resets the town and empties Wilbur's inventory, but after Wilbur passes a test, he'll automatically (and instantly) prepare for it on all subsequent iterations. Some tests are puzzles themselves, others merely cutscenes. Events happen at specific times, allowing Wilbur to take advantage of his foreknowledge. The player can also opt to skip straight to the abduction or give up on a test. Due to the time-loop gameplay mechanic, the game cannot be lost or rendered unwinnable.