As with most Level 9 games, the trilogy used an interpreted language termed A-code and was usable in all major types of home computer of the time, on either diskette or cassette.

In The Worm in Paradise, the player, with the role of an unnamed citizen of Eden, must travel around the city of Enoch, learn its secrets, earn money and save the planet.

Points are not scored for collecting treasures, but rather for doing specific tasks helping to satisfy the goal of the individual game.

And for Worm in Paradise the goal is to find as much information about the city as possible, obtain money, and then become a member of the governing party of Eden, saving the planet in the process.

A transport network has been developed for the entire Solar System using accelerator chains, and the "Big 5" nations of Earth have initiated a plan to colonise the galaxy.

During the 2190s fifty colony ships were launched from the EEC's Ceres base, among them the Snowball 9, which carried the first colonists for planet Eden on the Eridani A system.

The Snowball 9 caught the ice blocks with hooks and piled it around the passenger discs, forming a hollow shell that would cover most of the ship and would serve as a shield until it was needed to fuel the fusion engines on the later part of the trip.

The plan was to continue deceleration while consuming the last of the ice shell, and then put the ship in orbit around the planet, delivering the passengers down by gliders that would be retrieved by hooks to be reused.

The protagonist of the two first instalments, Kim Kimberley, is a tall, athletic, intelligent woman with brown eyes and fair hair.

She was born and raised at Hampstead Crèche, which was closed when she was thirteen years old due to violations of the Android Protection Acts.

She finished her education at the Milton Keynes School of Life in Malta, then returned to England for National Service.

The robots, being little more than automata, continue their everyday operations oblivious to the danger but the ship's computer, capable of thinking, awakens Kim Kimberley before the deranged crew member destroys it.

"[5][11] The debate came to an end with the release of Return to Eden, where it was made more explicit that Kim was not a man, because the surviving crew members confuse her with the woman who tried to destroy the ship.

The first thing the player must do is find a shelter for Kim, because a few moves into the game the Snowball 9 crew use the ship's engine to try to burn her down.

Unlike its predecessor, Return to Eden only had about two hundred and fifty locations,[12] but it was Level 9's first game to feature graphics.

The robot resembled a comic book character, so to avoid legal troubles, Level 9 commissioned Godfrey Dowson to do a new cover.

[17] Subsequently, the trilogy was released for a total of twelve platforms, leaving out the BBC Micro and Enterprise compared to The Worm in Paradise, but adding support for the Apple II, Amiga, Amstrad PCW, Atari ST, BM PC MS-DOS and Mac.

Both featured a 150 x 210 mm, 68-page booklet with loading instructions, a guide to playing the game and Peter McBride's novella Eden Song which served as an introduction to The Worm in Paradise.

[1] The novella was also used as a copy protection device, from which, upon restore of a saved game, the player had to enter a word from a page and line reference.