consciousness hologram

I thought I had played and reviewed this game long ago, but it turns out that I was thinking of Universal Hologram from 2021 by the same author, with some overlap in concepts (I swear I remember the pyramids).

This game is centered around the concept of living in a simulation. Several people have theorized that a sufficiently advanced civilization would simulate other civilizations, which could simulate more, etc. so that the chance that we are living in a simulation is very high, close to 100%.

There are many variants of this, including Rothko's basilisk, the idea that future AI will simulate post opponents of AI and torment them in hell forever. This game takes the stance that it's likely that future civilizations will simulate those in the past.

You play as someone (or a simulation of someone) living in Mars in a world where all needs can be eliminated. The game deals with themes of whether happiness can exist when decoupled from suffering and whether suffering is necessary for happiness, and the idea of the existence of a thing vs the experience of the existence of a thing.

It uses lampshading and occasional crude language to contrast with the elaborate language of the more philosophical parts, a combination common in a certain subset of early Twine games (especially Spy Intrigue and its immediate predecessors and successors).

Overall, I think it communicates a desperate search for meaning in life and a desire for human connection.