INPUT PROCESS

This game really spoke to me. It reminded me quite a bit of the last year of my marriage in an introspective, helpful way (outside of the creating an AI to help me work through things).

Like the blurb says, this game was written "On the making of your very own artificial general intelligence, and how to live — or not live — with it."

It is in three acts. The first has a portion mimicking a command-line interface and an AI that you are training. The second and third branch out into a more natural-looking interface as your program develops.

There are a lot of fancy styling techniques going on, from hover-over hints, slow typed-out text, the aforementioned interfaces, blacked out text that you have to hover over, images with different expressions.

The whole game (outside a bit of memories and intro) is a conversation between you and the AI you created as both of you try to figure out your place in the world. It is a romance, or, more accurately, the topics of conversation are about relationships.

I noticed that this is one of the last games to be reviewed. I think two possible reasons might be that the game mentions AI, perhaps giving the impression that generative AI was used (it might have been, but I don't think so; this is just a story about a fictional AI), and the game uses slow-typed text.

I usually hate slow-typed text and have gone on rants about it before, but I didn't mind it quite as much here, especially since I could often get the next line started before the first had finished typing, and I could read them in parallel, which was kind of fun. Also the small scope and lush nature of the game made it feel reasonable and even enjoyable.

Overall, I thought this was well done, and it resonated with me personally more than most games in the comp so far (which is completely subjective, and may not be everyone's experience).