Countdown

Countdown follows Mason Powers, a former CIA agent who awakens in a Turkish asylum with much of his memory erased. Accused of murdering his supervisor, Mason escapes after recovering parts of his past and becomes drawn into an international conspiracy involving espionage, terrorism, and murder.

The game emphasizes travel and conversation, supported by inventory-based puzzles and verb commands such as Look, Get, and Taste. Conversations feature commands including Help, Hassle, Pleasant, and Bluff, while wrong choices can cause death or an irreversible dead end. Some sections use top-down mazes, and the adventure is governed by a 96-hour in-game time limit.

Countdown combines hand-painted graphics with digitized photography, including scanned character portraits, and features digitized music and speech samples playable even through a PC speaker with special software. It was released for Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, and Quiz Machines.