Ripper

Story

Ripper is set in New York City in the year 2040, and starts with the investigation of the murder of Renee Stein, the third victim of a serial killer known as "The Ripper", mainly because of the similarity of his actions to Jack the Ripper. The player takes on the role of Jake Quinlan, a reporter for the Virtual Herald, to whom the Ripper sends messages describing his murders (an act attributed to Jack the Ripper, although it is not proven that the letters are his). Together with the police (whose investigation is led by Detective Vincent Magnotta), Quinlan searches for the true identity of the Ripper. After investigating the murder of Renee Stein, Quinlan receives a message from the Ripper warning him that his girlfriend Catherine Powell will be the next victim, as she has gotten too close to his identity. Quinlan manages to find Powell still alive, but she lies in a coma that is "deeper than anyone thought possible." Cyber-surgeon Claire Burton at Tribeca Center Hospital's Meta-Cognition Center manages to get a distorted picture of Powell's attacker, but she needs additional information from Quinlan to make it clearer. (This is also an allusion to Jack the Ripper, as the police hypothesized that they could create an image of the killer from the victims' retinas). He accomplishes this by finding out what Powell has discovered in her investigation and targeting three possible suspects for the Ripper's murders. To transfer this information directly into Powell's brain, he enlists the help of Joey Falconetti, a hacker who specializes in connecting directly to the human brain. In his research, Quinlan finds out that all of the Ripper's victims and everyone involved in the Ripper investigation (except Quinlan himself) belonged to an old gaming group called the Web Runners, which played a game based on the mystery of Jack the Ripper. In the last session of this game, one of the players died in real life. The player who died happened to be Catherine Powell's mother. Through the help of a pathologist named Vic Farley, it is learned that the Ripper's murders were committed by entering a code into the victim's brain in cyberspace that caused the internal body pressure to rise to the point of explosion, which Farley learns immediately after his explanation. Quinlan also finds a cyberspace weapon designed by a murdered cyberarchitect named Hamilton Wofford that was specifically designed to kill the Ripper in a virtual recreation of London's historic Whitechapel district, where the Jack the Ripper murders took place. After assembling the weapon and procuring the necessary protection from the Ripper's gun, Quinlan enters cyberspace, kills the Ripper and manages to escape from the virtual Whitechapel in time to avoid its destruction. The Ripper may be one of four possible suspects: Joey Falconetti, Claire Burton, Vincent Magnotta or Catherine Powell. On each playthrough, certain clues and the actual identity of the Ripper change, although most of the story remains unchanged and clues pointing to the guilt of all four suspects appear regardless of who the killer is. Catherine Powell, for example, experiences mysterious spikes in brainwave activity that coincide with all of the Ripper's murders, whether or not she is actually the Ripper, and there is no alternative explanation for these spikes. However, the changes in the game's story and puzzles are limited to the third act of the game - after Farley's death.