several things recently have reminded me of this old trailer for a PC game called "Maabus" that i used to watch all the time as a kid. i did think the Advanced 3D Graphics were Super Cool and i did kind of want to know what was up with this weird robot adventure but mostly i was obsessed with this song (Think About The Way by Ice MC, an early 90s eurodance jam). this particular youtube upload cites having acquired it on a Softkey Game Empire shareware disk and i'm 99% sure that was also where i got it.
i'm realizing that in spite of remembering this sometime in the past few years and digging up this trailer then too, i don't think i bothered looking up any gameplay footage, and doing so now gives very few results on youtube. wild. so, as far as i can tell, this game was not particularly popular, and i wouldn't be surprised if more people remember this game from its trailer on shareware discs than from actually playing it. weird to think about lol
Pretty much the only reason I remembered it (and uploaded this trailer, hi folks) is because Ross Scott did a somewhat thorough video on the game, top to bottom, front to back.
It is a deeply inscrutable FMV adventure game, where, if memory serves (it's been a few years), you're a manned drone exploring an alien crash site on a remote island. The plot is a bizarre stream of consciousness that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Ross even notes the game is so obscure he might be the first person to document the ending on Youtube. That's largely because unlike Myst (cited as a similar type of game), Maabus tries to be decidedly more action oriented, which means its stuffed full of "miss a prompt and instantly die", almost like proto-QTEs (but way less intuitive).
Before Ross's video my only context was also "that weird game trailer with the catchy dance music" and I was sort of blown away when Ross's video unlocked that memory.
