whoami

Let’s just get this out of the way up front: there’s a Towers of Hanoi puzzle in whoami. It’s only four disks, and seems like it’s at least partially a piss-take – the puzzle is meant to represent the transfer of a full digital encoding of human consciousness that takes literal years to scan in sufficient depth, so seeing this awesome and profound technological feat reduced to a brainteaser that last seemed cool when I was in middle school earned a bark of laughter. But still: it’s 2025, no more, please.

Fortunately, that’s about the only bad thing I have to say about the game! Despite having only used Windows since I graduated from college, I am a sucker for IF that mimics a UNIX shell, and whoami is one of the slickest examples of the subgenre I remember playing. It’s choice-based, so you don’t have to actually type commands, just click on directories and file-names to move around and open stuff, but the presentation is sufficiently authentic to make the player feel like a hacker, even as subtle color-coding helps guide you towards which things you should click. The drive isn’t especially big – I got through the game in maybe fifteen minutes? – and the plot isn’t especially novel, though it mashes up familiar elements into a mélange that I don’t think I’ve specifically seen before. But the “environmental storytelling” of putting together the narrative by reading emails, running a date routine to figure out how time is passing, and checking user logs to piece together what’s happened makes things feel fresh and engaging. Heck, it even hides the save/load functionality behind diegetic dump and reboot functions that you need to hunt around for, which in a longer game would be annoying but since you’ll almost certainly not need them, just registers as another fun bit of business.

whoami also knows the value of changing things up. OK, maybe the Towers of Hanoi were a flop, but otherwise the puzzles are well paced, punctuating progress and giving the player something to do beyond crawling directories. Sometimes this is just a matter of visual presentation, like the web-page mockup whose blaring light-mode makes an unignorable contrast with the black-background filesystem work of the rest of the game. But others are more interactive, including a gag even better than the Towers practical joke (Spoiler - click to show)(the fact that the “primitive” simulation is a seamlessly-implemented-in-Twine Inform game is hilariously meta). There’s also a pretty solid plot twist, and while, again, there’s nothing especially novel here, things move zippily enough that I never felt like the story was getting bogged down, with just enough detail provided to suggest depth without requiring the player to ever get stuck in the weeds, and the game ends just when you want it to. As for the prose, it’s unostentatious but effective, adopting multiple voices as needing and doing a credible impersonation of personal messages or bureaucratese as the situation varies.

I’m struggling to think of much else to say, because whoami is a short game that does exactly what it sets out to do, with style and substance to spare. Even those with a terminal aversion to disk-swapping puzzles should just grit their teeth and power through this once.