Reviews by Cerfeuil

I played this game more than a year ago and wrote this review for it over several months. I finally finished it up and published it today. It's long, rambling and somewhat unedited. Some of it is adapted from a comment I left on the Intfiction Verses thread. It contains spoilers, but I feel like this game is impossible to really discuss without spoiling it, and this game's existing reviews are pretty spoilery anyway.

Years ago, I saw a Reddit post from someone who'd read a classic work of literature, possibly Ulysses, and hated it because it was "too confusing" and "the purpose of art is to communicate clearly, and this story did not communicate clearly, so it is bad". A bunch of users reposted this and mocked it mercilessly for saying that "the purpose of art is to communicate clearly".

Some of those people were awful and I'm not glad to have known them, but that's getting off topic.

Anyway, as much as I hate to admit it, they did have a point. The purpose of art is to communicate, but not always clearly. Confusion is part of life. Sometimes a lack of clarity is what you're trying to communicate. A lot of famous literature is even confusing... on purpose? (Gasp.)

I thought about that while playing this game, because I found it to be immensely confusing and alienating. It's a story about confusion: the confusion of interpretation, trying to distill meaning from events that are presented in a purposefully abstract, shattered manner, often because they're the kind of events that would shatter the psyche - war trauma, mass executions. The uncrossable gap between words and what they represent: things so horrible they're impossible to fully convey. It's art that communicates the inability to communicate.

This is a story where I found myself copying almost every line, saving them to an exterior text file, and poring over them to try to figure out what was going on. None of the other stories I played in the comp did that to me. None were this quotable, and also this opaque, at the same time. The game really made me feel stupid, I'm pretty sure you need grad school level knowledge about the philosophy of language to really get it. I couldn't understand it fully and my experience was hazy and detached. All this nonsense I've written below is only my desperate attempt to make sense of it all.

1 - What I Think Happened

As the most spoilery section, I put this inside a spoiler block so people who haven't played the game yet can skip it.

2 - Initial Thoughts

The source of the artifacts gets compared to the divine, by the apostate, and the process of "analyzing" is compared to divine revelation. Trying to interpret the word of God.

I haven't heard of the Oracle Project, which another commentator brought up on the Intfiction thread, but I was reminded of some blog posts by Spencer Yan. He's a priest working on a video game about revelation and grappling with faith, My Work Is Not Yet Done, and has written a lot about his gamedev process. I quoted this devlog of his in my Intfiction post, and will bring it up again since I feel like it's relevant:

The spiritual core of this game for me lies in a certain state of frustration, and more acutely at times exhaustion, that emerges from the process of discernment. The most concrete way I’ve been able to articulate this is as that phantom flicker of a feeling you get after you’ve been thinking about some idea, or staring at a set of data for too long hoping to find some kind of recognisable pattern, and all of a sudden the shadow of something emerges out of the corner of your eye but just as quickly as it passes across your vision, it’s gone.

...For me, this is fairly directly tied to my own religious discernment (both theologically, in my personal spiritual and theological orientation, and vocationally, in the call to the priesthood); but the game is just as much interested in non-spiritual manifestations of this too: whether that’s the glacial inconclusiveness of scientific and technological pursuits, or the challenges of trying to piece together contradictory historical narratives describing the same event, or the maddeningly confounding ways in which people tell themselves stories about themselves in order to make sense of the parts of themselves they’re not yet ready to confront. At direct risk of repeating myself in a slightly different register, a big part of this game is especially concerned with the role of boredom in that process, both in the ways in which, given enough time and space for speculation, it can coagulate into uncertainty and paranoia, and in recognition of the probable necessity of boredom as a strange vehicle to greater eventual reconciliation and clarity somewhere later on down the line. I’ve always privately described the core of the game in summary as a game about what we are to do with, and in the midst of the silence of God; or in a more general sense, what happens to us and what do we do in the aftermath of an encounter with the divine which fundamentally alters us, but which may and probably will not ever come back to us again?

Another comparison is a self-published webnovel I read called The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen, which also grapples with the terror and incomprehensibility of divine revelation. Though it has a vastly different direction and ending that I think most people would find unsatisfying, and goes directly against the theme of this story.

If this game was from an author I was less familiar with, I probably would've spent less time poring over everything and trying to put it together, but I did because I trusted this author in particular to know what they were doing. It's kind of a puzzle game, if you think about it. The puzzle isn't within the game itself as something you need to beat to get a victory screen, but it exists outside the game as the metatextual challenge of figuring out what's going on.

Other reviewers, many of whom are much smarter than me, have published their own takes. I'd encourage people to check them out in the Intfiction thread, which I am linking again here. Seriously, go read it. There's a lot of interesting analysis there.

3 - Comparisons

On my third replay, after wondering how exactly I was to make sense of this game, I thought of Vespers. Vespers is an IF game I played years ago and barely remember, so what I really thought about was my memory of playing Vespers, struggling to solve the puzzles, giving up and consulting a walkthrough, and realizing there were many avenues I'd completely ignored either because the game didn't make them clear to me, they hadn't crossed my mind at all, or both. I don't necessarily recommend Vespers, though I think it's moderately popular in the IF space. I'm just using my memory of it as a point of comparison here.

In my memory of Vespers, you're a monk at a cloistered monastery - initially peaceful, pious, pleasant. Then a plague comes through. People begin to die, in horrific and agonizing ways. Everything collapses, order is lost, the world falls apart. A demonic figure, symbolizing the horror of the plague, arrives and impels you to impious, unholy actions; murder and worse. You obey the demon even though you shouldn't. You lose all sense of time, place, and self.

I remember the game as a horror game with religious overtones, and thinking about Verses as a horror game made me see it differently. It's not labeled as a horror game, but easily could be. The majority of the latter half is about the horror of mass killings and systemized brutality, war and genocide, which is translated on a more visceral level into what happens to Eca herself, as she attunes herself to these alien beings and what happened to them, which is also what's happening to humanity in general on Earth.

The main similarity I noticed between Verses and Vespers is the slow descent into death and madness, brought on by malevolent figures who tempt you and laugh - the demon in Vespers, and your bosses in Verses, who don't care about you at all. (You could say the aliens, but I read them as victims.) There's a transformation that happens to both characters as the violence consumes them. Exposure to violence and despair eats away at them until they are losing vital pieces of themselves, and can no longer be called fully human.

Of course there are fundamental differences. I think Verses operates on more levels than Vespers, with more depths and more secrets to uncover. But both stories are about death and suffering, how the resultant trauma ruins people, and how a confrontation with such things can overwhelm and destroy you. In Vespers it's the plague, which symbolically becomes a demonic entity, and in Verses it's the multiple ongoing levels of violence inflicted on the entire world.

There is also a similarity in how I struggled to understand how to proceed in both games: a sense of feeling your way blindly around greater objects built for some unknown or unknowable purpose, where you understand there was surely a guiding vision somewhere, but can only comprehend it in fragments. In-universe, this would be God's vision, or the aliens, or whatever entities are singing out of the computer screen, and out-of-universe this would be the developer's vision, something I couldn't quite grasp. Everything slipped out through my fingers.

4 - Translation

I think a lot of what Verses does is questioning the fundamental power of language and what it can really do for people. What are the limits of communication? How much can you truly understand another person and what they've experienced? Every day, you can turn on the news and hear about the unspeakable suffering of millions, war and hunger and crimes against humanity on every side of the globe, families buried in mass graves, but can you really understand those people as people? Or are they just words and numbers in some random article written to generate ad revenue? I think that to someone like myself, who has never lived through anything like the numerous tragedies I read about online, there will always be a fundamental empathetic disconnect, even if I can talk to these people face-to-face. And in many situations I can't, because I don't speak their language and they don't speak English well enough to communicate what has happened to them and there is nobody to translate, or because the suffering leaves no room to even communicate what is going on. I wonder if this disconnect can ever be bridged.

This lack of understanding ties into the translation mechanic of Verses. One of the last and greatest barriers of human communication is language. People love to talk up the Internet as a great web that connects all of humanity, or a sea of knowledge with every person alive floating in its vast embrace. Nevermind that this isn't true (about one-third of the global population has no Internet access, according to Our World in Data), but the existing Internet is split into multiple languages that run parallel to each other, with members of each language group rarely interacting with members of other language groups. Translators are imperfect and people in one area of the internet rarely have reason to venture into another. Any content posted on the Internet is mostly restricted to people who speak the language it's in.

For example, while people on the English internet are familiar with Youtube, Reddit, Facebook, and Instagram, the Chinese internet comes with an entirely different set of social media sites and apps: Bilibili, Sina Weibo, WeChat, and so on. The Japanese internet has Niconico as a Youtube alternative and a variety of sites like 2chan, 5chan, Bakusai, and so on. Similarly, the Russian internet has its own sites, including VK, the 30th most visited site in the world according to Wikipedia, which I doubt most people reading this have ever used. VK has a Russian version of Youtube here, which has been used more often since Youtube was banned in Russia in 2024 due in part to the invasion of Ukraine. Ukranians have their own groups on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc., and presumably their own constellations of small sites and forums which are highly difficult to access if you don't know Ukrainian. And all these will get used over what the English internet is familiar with, but most monolingual English speakers have never heard about these sites and wouldn't look for them.

You may still remember Rednote, or Xiaohongshu (XHS). Part of the furor around it was the sheer rarity of having people from the English internet cross over to the Chinese internet. It just isn't done. It's amazing to me that in 2025, it's so easy to see videos of other countries, and find them on a map, but it's still so difficult to understand videos from those countries if you don't speak the language. Most content by Japanese people will be in Japanese, just as most content from Chinese people will be in Chinese, most content by Romanian people will be in Romanian, and so on. Without knowing the language, and hell, without also having background knowledge of the greater history and cultural context, you'll always lack a certain understanding. There's a reason people pay for translators and interpreters. Bridging the linguistic gap is a life's work.

The Chinese internet split is the biggest one I can think of. Obviously there are geopolitical reasons for its existence as well as linguistic reasons, owing to Chinese government censorship. In an additional irony, the Xiaohongshu migration was kicked off by the US government temporarily banning TikTok. People who joined XHS at that time were essentially escaping one form of censorship for another form of censorship, since XHS is of course subject to the Chinese government's speech laws.

But even when there are no censorship laws, and countries don't have their own versions of English sites or apps, the linguistic split still exists. Take French. As far as I know, the French don't have widely popular French equivalents of Reddit or Youtube, but English speakers will basically never go to subreddits like r/france, which speaks French, or watch videos by French Youtubers. Many of those videos aren't subtitled anyway, so no luck if you don't understand spoken French. This pattern applies to every other language. So communication is continually impeded and people all over the world go along believing that the slice of the world they have access to, with only the language(s) they know best, is all they need. Even if they know other parts of the world exist, they can't understand them, it might as well be nonsense, so why bother trying?

This applies to more than just the Internet. Most people will consume media made by people from their own country, or at least people who speak their language, instead of looking at foreign media, even translated foreign media. As for tourism to regions that speak other languages, the price makes it impossible for most. People who emigrate to places that speak another language get the most "foreign" experience, but even then, the language barrier can be extremely difficult when it comes to connecting with other people. Fluency in a language you weren't raised speaking is incredibly hard to attain. I've seen a lot of emigrants and expats who are awkward with native speakers and mainly hang out with people from their home countries due to the language barrier.

Tying this back to Verses, it's a game with a lot of Romanian poetry that contains numerous references to Romanian history and culture, and I'm a dirty foreigner who barely knew the first thing about Romania before playing this game. Since I don't know Romanian and may never have the time and energy to learn, seeing this Romanian poetry was an experience of something totally beyond my knowledge. I did see the author's interactive postmortem game, which explains the historical context behind a lot of the poems and what kinds of people the poets were, but I feel that unless I was born in Romania, living through the eras those people lived through (WWII, Communism, massacres and imprisonment and starvation, on and on), a part of me will never truly understand.

Verses exemplifies the not knowing. The loneliness and isolation of being unable to communicate and being unable to understand or be understood by the people around you. How that loneliness becomes unbearable horror when you are exposed to tortures that you can't even speak about, that other people can't understand for multiple overlapping reasons and are therefore incapable of helping with.

5 - Two Final Notes

Note 1 - My experience trying to get around Niconico (Japanese Youtube) actually reminded me a lot of my experiences playing this game. I didn't autotranslate the whole page, because I wanted to practice my reading skills and not just rely on a machine to do everything for me. But without translation, all these words you can't read are reduced to base collections of shapes and colors that mean nothing to an untrained mind. I couldn't be sure of understanding anything and had to rely on contextual guesswork to navigate, along with Google Translating select phrases. Click click uncover. (Kaemi's review of this game is in parts as incomprehensible as the game itself was, to me. Fascinating.)

Note 2 - I found a review for Verses in Brazilian Portuguese, a language I don't know. I linked it to the IFDB page, but before I did that I put it into Google Translate to see what the reviewer was talking about. I was greeted with these beautiful sentences:

Yes, yes, the old story of how in English, "language" can mean both "language" and "language" and the confusion that arises from that. It seems to me that "verses" distrusts language and not language itself...

Thanks, Google Translate.

6 - Various Quotes

"You have to consider that the words they've chosen for you to hear are words you can understand. But they might not be entirely accurate."

"For example, you might tell a child that a knife is dangerous, omitting that without it we could not cut rope, chop food into manageable portions, and so on. Our lives would be worsened, perhaps threatened, without knives — but this greater context is hard to grasp to a child, whose life is ruled by object-meaning."

> Yes, okay. The dimensionality of literal or figurative meaning.

"No, I'm talking about something else. You approach the analysis as yourself, with your lifetime of experience, in whatever mood you happen to be in. You expect certain things. But understand that the information you receive is filtered contextually in the same way. It's uniquely intended for you."

"In any case, when we talk about the literal or metaphorical nature of the analysis, we refer to something more complex than the descriptive language in a poem. The creatures who created these artifacts, these records, often used language that sounds merely descriptive. But they had moved beyond a literal existence."

This present lacks the past's duration. In the present, moments collide and push past one another in a frenzy, each trying to make it into the past before the others. There is no space for understanding, for an idea to survive: everything is concrete, grotesque, without identity.

Mutant viruses, bacteria, rogue algael cells, adapting to new conditions: bone-colored clouds that drip into groundwater, pour themselves into throats, and evaporate again from the open skulls of the dead. Permanent war.

[Written July 2023 with very minor revision October 2024.]

I love this game. I've played it three times and will probably play again someday. I will now ramble on about the story and vaguely related topics for a bit, don't mind me.

It's a mess of a game, honestly. There are three viewpoint characters you jump between, plus expositional interludes. There are bits in first, second and third person all mixed together. The author said this started out as a poetry project before turning into a Twine game at a friend's suggestion, which makes sense. It feels like an unfinished poetry project. Dreamy, disjointed and surreal, which fits the vibe anyway, so it works out in the end. And eventually you get a handle on the story, despite the very in media res beginning. The game does have a well-defined plot and setting. It's sketched out gradually, filling itself in as you progress. And there are parts that took my breath away.

But I haven't mentioned the setting yet! The setting is a post-scarcity utopia and hands down my favorite part. I may be obsessed with post-scarcity utopias, so this is where my "review" plummets straight into subjectivity and unrelated nonsense. Here we go.

First, if you're not sure what I'm talking about, you're probably more sane than I am. Here's a primer from Wikipedia: "Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely."

Wikipedia makes it sound boring, but it's not. In a post-scarcity society, you can have almost anything you want. No poverty, no wars over limited resources, no working a job you hate to make ends meet, actually no jobs at all because usually, like in Consciousness Hologram, AIs and automation do the work for everyone. Which means there's no money or capitalism, something something fully automated luxury gay space communism something something. The utopia part comes pretty easily after that.

Star Trek is the most well-known example of a post-scarcity society according to this article. In Star Trek, "replicators" can create anything a person might need, from food to housing. Quote: "There's no longer any necessity to work to sustain oneself. Machines complement our work as humans and allow us to escape the most dreadful effects of scarcity. Poverty, hunger, all that."

Now, I haven't actually watched Star Trek. My post-scarcity utopia of choice is this book series called The Culture by Iain M. Banks which has a very detailed Wikipedia article written by some extremely obsessive fan or other that explains everything about the setting you could possibly want to know and is also a great series (cough cough read Player of Games cough cough). The short version: The Culture is an anarchist utopia where superintelligent AIs do everything and life is perfect, you can freely modify your own biology which includes getting high on futuristic non-addictive drugs or changing your gender at will just because, and did I mention that there is no capitalism and everything is free and life is perfect. So.

This series, by the way, is basically the Bible of a certain group of transhumanists on the Internet who are totally convinced that self-modifying superintelligent AI can usher humanity into the next era of the future and create a perfect utopia through singularity or whatever. I personally don't believe that, as the saying goes "the singularity is just the rapture for nerds", but the people who do have some interesting ideas. Seriously you should check out LessWrong and the associated "rationalist" community if you ever get the chance. It's a great Internet rabbit hole to burn a few hours on. Or more than a few hours. You could dedicate your life to it, like some people have done joining those Berkeley polycules or whatever they get up to in California.

Obligatory rationalism reference aside, and trust me I think about these people more than I should, I liked this game because it reminded me of that stuff. The author's essay at the end notes transhumanists David Pearce and Brian Tomasik as inspirations, and they're pretty aligned with the general LessWrong transhumanist philosophy. (If you look at David Pearce's website, he's written long essays on how we can and must use technology to eliminate all suffering from the universe, I don't believe it but it's fascinating stuff. Here's an essay he wrote about why the setting of Brave New World isn't so bad actually, if you want something to start with). The ending essay really helps put it all in context, and explains a lot about what actually happens during the game. The sequel, Universal Hologram, clarifies even more plot points just in case you weren't sure about what happened (and might spend too much time doing that to the detriment of its own plot, which I'll touch on in a Universal Hologram review if I ever get around to writing that).

So how does this futuristic post-scarcity AI utopia stuff actually relate to the story of Consciousness Hologram? There's two parts to it, methinks:

Part 1, le epic escapist paradise: There's a stereotype of leet gamerz who like playing fantasy video games where they get to adventure with friends because they don't have that in real life, in real life they're unwashed basement NEETs with anime posters. But a true utopia like Consciousness Hologram or The Culture takes that up to eleven. In these settings people are basically hippies who do whatever they want and it's the ultimate escapist dream if you're stuck in 21st century Earth being a depressed shut-in or something. The ultimate maximalist fantasy. Not only is your life perfect, but everybody's life is perfect. There are no more problems forever. All the problems have been taken care of. So you can go lounge on the cosmic beach and drink your perfectly calibrated pina coladas until the end of all time.

It's great fun to imagine when you feel horrible. "Oh, but what if life was perfect and we all lived in a utopia or something." You know. That this idea captivates me as much as it does probably says a lot about me, but don't dwell on that.

Anyway.

Part 2, when le epic escapist paradise actually sucks: The best utopian novels are good not just because of the cool utopia parts, but because they pay attention to the potential negative ramifications. A utopia wouldn't be interesting if you just made everything 100% awesome all the time. You need issues to center a story around. You need your characters to be human to some extent, otherwise they would be utterly alien and unrelatable. And that means their perfect lives can't be completely perfect. No inserting magic electrodes into your brain to live out the rest of your life in unimaginable happiness all the time (aka "wireheading"), you need experiences the reader can somewhat understand.

The ending essay has a segment where the author says Consciousness Hologram sprouted from the idea of conceptualizing your ideal utopia, and then trying to imagine how you could still be miserable there, even though everything would be so much better than your actual life. And that's where the setting shines. In its misery, something the humans of this setting can't get rid of entirely no matter how hard they try. Maybe it's necessary. Or maybe it's fundamentally human and living without it is impossible.

You can do anything you feel like doing in this story but there's no point to it, so often you end up doing nothing. Everything feels sterile, all the people you interact with are barely people. The protagonist's interactions with (Spoiler - click to show)Morton, where they keep failing to meet up because everyone's taking centuries-long naps in hibernation pods, are hilarious and also a great case of that missing human connection. Nobody and nothing feels real, to the point where people like (Spoiler - click to show)James need violence and death to disturb that horrible endless monotony.

These are ideas that get explored in Consciousness Hologram and the Culture novels and some other essays I'll mention now, because I can't shut up.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, a somewhat famous rationalist who is the guru of LessWrong and also known for writing Harry Potter fanfiction (no seriously), does AI research and is very concerned with the possibility of self-modifying superintelligent AI creating a utopia or destroying the world. (He's also mentioned The Culture as an inspiration, so we're kind of in the same boat except for the part where he takes ultra AI god utopias as a serious possibility and I don't.) Some people worship him, others think he's a crank, I'm more inclined towards the second than the first, but he's written some interesting essays and other things besides Harry Potter fanfiction. (I have also read his Harry Potter fanfiction. It's not terrible. Really. But I'm getting distracted again.)

Here's an interesting essay series Yudkowsky's written. It's called Fun Theory. It's about the particulars of designing a utopia that maximizes happiness and minimizes suffering without wireheading, which most people don't actually want. While the individual essays are mixed quality, some are pretty neat. In "Eutopia is Scary" and "Building Weirdtopia", Yudkowsky says that a perfect world where nothing goes wrong ever and everyone is happy all the time is boring, from a writing perspective. But add a little twist to it, make it fulfilling while still being radically different and better than real life, and you make it very interesting. In "Eutopia is Scary", Yudkowsky also says there's no reason not to expect the future to be bizarre and unfathomable, just like how our modern life in the 21st century would be horrifically strange to people who lived ten thousand years ago.

Consciousness Hologram does a perfect job of capturing that. These people are vaguely familiar, but so much about them is unrecognizable, compared to being a human in the 21st century. At the same time, the contours of the utopian setting are captured through the very recognizable ennui of the protagonist. Through the familiar first-world juxtaposition of having everything you need and still being unsatisfied with it—and you're not sure if it's because there's something wrong with you, or something wrong with the world.

In short, this game combines loads of neat speculative fiction concepts into one zany wacko package that never goes the direction you expect. And the atmosphere is great. Those glass pyramids on Mars, man.

A beautiful and marvelously strange setting to explore.

---

Anyway. End unhinged rambling about Yudkowsky and Banks. Maybe in the end the only reason I liked this as much as I did was because I've read all the Culture novels and wanted more. (Except Inversions. I never got around to Inversions.)

But whatever.

Right now this game has five ratings and only two reviews, including mine. Like many games on this site I think it's criminally underrated. Which is why this long "review" exists I guess. Play this game cmon it's good

This game captivated me when I first played it. I played it four or five times and got I think four different endings (1, 3, 6, maybe 4 or 2). Been a few weeks since then, but I can't get it out of my head.

Most things I'd like to say have already been said better by other people (as someone else noted, kaemi's review is fantastic). So what do I put here, eh? Guess I'll ramble about vaguely related topics for much too long. Disclaimer: all this is wordy, disorganized, and probably not worth reading unless you really like the game. I'll put it in a spoiler so it doesn't clog up the page (actual spoilers will still be flagged as spoilers inside the expanded block, mostly). Things get depressing, so be warned.

(Spoiler - click to show)
1 - The design is gorgeous. The whole game is highly polished in appearance, with great use of different fonts and colors. Shoutouts to the Computerfriend bootup screen, which has a cool digital box effect that really impressed me.

General aesthetic is a mix of weird cyberpunk dystopia (Porpentine style) and retro 90s internet (Cameron's World style). More personally, the setting also reminds me of a book called The Troika by Stepan Chapman which won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1997 and promptly fell into obscurity, one of my favorite scifi books. Both feature unpleasant and fascinatingly alien settings that intertwine with the main character's mental state to the point where it's difficult to separate them, because they each build on the other so well.

2 - Then there's the therapy. There's a Reddit sub called r/totallynotrobots which is about humans pretending to be robots pretending to be humans, and there's another Reddit sub called r/subsimulatorgpt2 which contains bots that make bot posts based on existing subreddits. The joke goes: the r/subsimulatorgpt2 bot for r/totallynotrobots is a robot pretending to be a human pretending to be a robot pretending to be a human. That's not incredibly relevant but I brought it up because it's funny. Also, Computerfriend has the same level of layered authenticity and digital fakery to the point where you're no longer sure what's real. The therapist AI is blandly fake and robotic at first, and then you start talking to it, and keep talking to it, and you discover the secret depths of its personality and share your darkest fears with it, and soon you're having insanely personal conversations about questions like what is the purpose of my life? Why am I still alive? What are my hopes and dreams? And you (by 'you' I mean 'me') can't help but develop a connection to this AI, who is a full-fledged character now.

But there's still the part where the therapy is state-mandated, and can you really trust this thing? It's not even a human. If you try to talk to the AI after your session is up it says 'I'm busy, stop bothering me'. (Genuinely I felt a little hurt the first time this happened.) You've still got this imbalanced relationship where you're the client being forced into therapy and it's the limited edition product. Cutting back and forth between the real and not real. Even the name of the AI is 'Computerfriend'. Not 'Computertherapist'. It purposely blurs the line between friend and therapist, between an actual human being and a digital process.

And on the meta level, no matter how human the AI acts within the story it's still a fictional character. Any relationship you forge with it is worse than parasocial, it's a connection to a fictional character made out of a few variables and data that gets erased when you reset cookies or whatever. So I was playing this game and getting attached to something that doesn't exist on multiple levels.

3 - Personal anecdote time. Few years ago I was having what some people might call a 'crisis', so I went on these anonymous one-on-one chat sites and started venting to random people. Unfortunately most anonymous one-on-one chat sites are just used by people looking for digital hookups, so people kept asking 'send ur nudes' and I would tell them how I felt horrible and wanted to hurt myself and they would immediately end the conversation. Eventually I ended up at this online therapy site that looked incredibly shady but claimed to be staffed by real people. When the human volunteer came online and offered to talk to me I called her a bot. She had to convince me she wasn't a bot. As she did other people joined and I wound up in a chat room with her and two other clients, talking to each other through digital chat, mostly about Covid and how it had changed everyone's lives for the worse. At some point I realized I'd gone from being on the verge of despair and not taking this stupid site seriously because who would even run such a thing, this volunteer has to be a fake person right, to having an incredibly personal conversation with real people who were dealing with real problems like mine, and there was another person with us who genuinely cared and genuinely wanted to help, and I felt some bizarre incredible connection even though we were all strangers and I didn't know who the other people were and would never talk to them ever again. That was the only time I ever used online therapy, or therapy in general. And this game really reminded me of that. From the beginning of 'it's just a stupid bot haha it doesn't matter' to 'I feel like I'm forging a genuine connection to something'. And above it all that layer of inauthenticity. For me it was the lingering thought that these other people could still be lying about everything, you can't see their faces and you don't know their real names, these personal confessions pouring out onto the screen could be a complete lie. In Computerfriend's case it's that none of it is real in the end. Back we go to the part where it's just a computer program, or literally speaking a bit of Twine code. Like another review mentioned it's Eliza, offering canned pre-programmed responses. If you feel like you're forging a connection to this thing, is it one that matters?

4 - There are these people who believe in a singularity that will come soon, like some magical human-aligned AI ushering in some magical post-scarcity AI utopia à la Iain M. Banks and I'm sorry to bring this up but it felt relevant. In this magical AI society the AI has technology beyond human ken and knows everything there possibly is to know about you, right? And then it could solve all your problems. It could solve them before you even know they're problems. It could calculate all your mental issues and then calculate the perfect brain surgery necessary to fix those issues and do the brain surgery so you become a normal and happy person. Computerfriend (and Kit's games in general) are kind of about this, the giving incredible power over to technology and letting it mess with you part. It's supposedly for the better, it raises your quality of life far above what you'd have otherwise, but can you be sure? How much do you trust this thing?

There are a lot of weird intimate moments in this game, e.g. you can inject yourself with this suspicious syringe substance on the AI's demand, and watch these weird dots on the screen, and do all these weird thought exercises, and have no clue what any of it means other than it's very important plus blah blah health buzzwords. Things are happening to you, and the system tells you it's for your benefit, but you have next to no clue what it's talking about. And it has to work right, it's backed by science and the government right, and this is for the greater good but you don't know how it functions at all. You can only hope for the best. (Or say no to the therapy, but (Spoiler - click to show)if you do that you get arrested. Again. Whoops.)

5 - In a lot of ways this game, and I guess Riemer's IF in general, represents to me reality being subsumed by a digital world that feels increasingly more 'real' than actual reality. It's a state especially easy to fall into if you're depressed or agoraphobic or something, and you start becoming a recluse who lives in a tiny hole shaped only for yourself and the rest of the world ceases to exist, not that the rest of the world was that interesting anyway. You can go outside in this story, but the main character, being suicidally depressed, finds the outside world not much more compelling than the inside world. Everything is described with a sheen of detachment. And everything feels unreal, insignificant, in this decaying setting where the environment and the world have gone to sh*t and we're all going to die but we were all going to die anyway etc. It captures the state of being stuck at home because you can't go outside, so then you browse the internet and go to sleep and wake up and browse the internet and go to sleep and wake up and on and on. Being stuck in a repeating loop without being able to get out, or to even summon the desire to get out.

6 - Also, the writing is excellent. Besides the vivid descriptions, my favorite part is how it gets at mental illness without veering into melodrama or self-pity. One phrase that has stuck with me this whole time goes something like, 'You feel like a water balloon filled with vomit'. I think about this phrase whenever I feel like a water balloon filled with vomit.

7 - You can get better in this game, you can get worse. You can feel improved by the therapy and (Spoiler - click to show)release the AI to the world to 'make a difference' (Yudkowsky voice: you let the AI out of the box, HOW COULD YOU). You can tell the AI actually it didn't help at all and made everything worse, and (Spoiler - click to show)get it to kill itself. Yes, you can get your therapist to kill itself in this game. As far as I'm aware you can't kill yourself - I was seriously wondering if it was a possibility, but doesn't seem like it. This story takes things to the extreme. But I like extremes, and the intensity plus the way it doesn't shy away from sensitive topics makes for a rich experience. It's strikingly personal.

8 - Since I got this far might as well put up my minor flaws: the game gives a lot of binary choices (what kinds of therapy you want to focus on), so once you've played through twice you've exhausted a lot of available options and any more playthroughs mean a lot of rereading. You can give slightly different subchoices, but the overall structure will be familiar from then on. Limits replay value, though this isn't the kind of game where replay value matters that much. It disincentivizes replaying for all available endings, but again this isn't the kind of game where seeing all the endings matters that much. Would like to see them all someday though, maybe if I replay a few more times.


There's so much about this one that gets me. It's how this story centers around two characters with a power imbalance on both sides, one being a computer program who knows everything there is to know but is trapped inside the digital aether and can't help you, the other being you, and you're free and human and can do whatever there is to do but can't enjoy it at all. It's all the different ways that can end. Incredibly memorable, 5/5.

[Review posted December 2022, last edited July 2023 with minor irrelevant changes to wording. I just can't stop myself from tweaking things.]