One Button Travel
Review

One Button Travel (2015) is a stylish text adventure where you communicate across time to try and cancel your permanent holiday in a dystopian future. You try and save your accomplice, who's already stuck in the future, by making choices and solving puzzles. Your options are limited, but this intentionally makes social commentary on regulation and authoritarianism.

You accidentally book a one-way trip to the future, where your body will be frozen until time travel is invented. By communicating with someone in the future via your phone, you learn of the dystopian state of the world, where people are mistreated and kept under close supervision. To cancel your trip, you must uncover the cancellation code, and try and save your helper in the future along the way.

You select responses to the texts sent to you, which can alter the story and give you different pieces of the puzzle. the cancellation code is a 5-digit password which you find out by asking questions and responding in certain ways.

Weighing in at 55000 words this is a substantial interactive novel. Your choices affect the story, although it does eventually lead to the same ending every time. The result is a first hand experience where you must face regulation and control to save your friend.

Our examiner, Ben Kendall, first checked One Button Travel 23 months ago. It was re-examined by Andy Robertson and updated 23 months ago.