Panic!

Overview

Panic! (JP: Switch) is a surreal adventure puzzle game for the Sega CD, developed by Sega and Office I. and published by Sega in Japan in 1993 and Data East in the United States in 1994. The game is like a lot of Sega CD games of the era that can only be loosely described as a "game" at all. The plot of the game is that a computer that controls the world has gone corrupt and has caused the world's electronic devices to go haywire. It's up to a boy named Slap and his dog Stick to find their way to the central computer and fix it, to do this players must push a variety of switches and hope for the best.

Quite literally that's the game, each scene in the game has a panel of switches that the player can press with only one advancing them forward, some will take them backwards to the previous scene and some will just make weird things happen (such as whales flying by inside Slap's house). There is a map that allows players to chart their progress, and there is an ending to the game.

The game was re-released in Japan for the PlayStation 2 in 2002.

Reception

Panic! was not well-received at the time, being one of only 12 games to receive a score of 1.0 or lower from Gamepro magazine.