A thoroughly weird title made for Sega CD, this game is a bizarre mix of weird content, scatological humour, extremely simple gameplay, and nonsensical narrative, animated with a striking visual style and strange sound effects. Light on plot, but heavy on sight gags, PANIC! attempts to humorously explore the risks and consequences of rogue agents in a fully-networked world, something like “Monty Python presents: The Matrix”. Requiring no skills beyond point-and-click, PANIC! expects very little of the player beyond a ready — and forgiving — sense of humor. It delivers a disc packed with content, and while the gameplay is little more than a convoluted gag browser, PANIC! manages to surprise, disgust, delight, and entertain players,
while never letting you forget how weird it is. In 1993, the 16-bit Sega Genesis was getting long in the tooth, and the Sega CD peripheral was enjoying some fragile success in North America. In Japan, the Sega Mega Drive and the Mega Drive CD were not doing as well. CD-powered consoles were still a hard sell, as so few games could convincingly show what CDs offered to players beyond better music and pre-rendered cutscenes.
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