whoami

I played and reviewed the Spanish version of this game before. When I play a game in another language, it has an air of mystique around it to me. Everything seems cooler when it's in another language. But it's harder.

Playing this game in English was an interesting change. It uses a lot of technobabble which was mostly incomprehensible when I played the Spanish version. Here I can understand it more, and turn a more critical eye on it. But the technobabble still holds up pretty well; the ideas used are at least plausible.

This game is about mind uploads. You don't know that at first; the game simulates a file system like DOS or command line Linux. Navigating the file structure, you discover that a war is wiping out humanity. You are going to die. A brain upload might be what saves you.

The majority of the game is piecing together what is going on through navigating the file system and finding older documents.

Along the way, the game uses interesting mechanics, including a simulated Inform parser (written entirely in Twine) and a cheeky towers of Hanoi (cheeky because it's a famously bad puzzle to put into an IF game, so much that several games mock the concept, like Wizard Sniffer that has a dumpster with towers of hanoi in it at the start. I don't mind it too much here).

This game is visually rich and has subtle details that can really throw you for a loop and more explicit text that will help you connect the dots (I'm thinking here of [spoiler]checking the date before and after the upload. It gave me a realization that was later explicitly confirmed.[/spoiler]

I liked it in Spanish, and I like it in English.