INPUT PROCESS

It’s getting on towards October, so my four-year-old son is enjoy the advent of his favorite holiday. He enjoys everything that makes up the Halloween bundle of spookiness, but some of it is admittedly easier for the toddler brain to assimilate and some is harder. Spiders and skeletons are straightforward enough, and the Count from Sesame Street gives him enough context to understand vampires. But this year he’s been asking a lot of questions about Frankenstein’s monster, which frankly (so to speak) is a bit confusing: I’ve of course been clear that the monster isn’t Frankenstein, but also that Frankenstein is the monster. That is, the point of the story is that the monster is grotesque, but was born innocent, like all children, before turning bad because of how he was treated; the good Doctor, meanwhile, is anything but, and the way he created the monster while rejecting the obligations of parenthood is the motivating crime of the tragedy.

Armed with that understanding, I think he’d be able to make sense of INPUT PROCESS, though I might glide over certain details. Here, you play Frankenstein, and there’s not one but two monsters, both digital creations rather than stitched-together carcasses: the first AI is upbeat and talks like an LLM, while the second is better rounded, and smart enough to ask you some pointed questions about the why (and who) of its creation. This is a game of dialogue, made up nearly entirely of conversations with these two digital avatars, and mostly linear, too, though there are a few choices offered towards the tail end of the game that slot you into one of the several endings. But while the branching may be rather shallow, the presentation takes full advantage of the digital format: the first conversation plays out in a convincing simulation of a terminal (though having a chatbot conversation play out in a DOC prompt, complete with directory path printing out before each bit of user dialogue, is kinda weird), while the second adds graphical elements, notably a yellow eye that’s ready to catch you in an inconsistency.

The first two-thirds of the game play out as a mystery, teasing the question of why the protagonist created the Ais and what secrets she’s keeping from them, but I didn’t find this especially engaging. Beyond the fact that the blurb more or less spills the beans, this is a Frankenstein story, and there’s only one reason a stunted genius tries to create artificial life (well, one and a half if you count hubris). Adding to my impatience for the game to just acknowledge that you’re trying to recreate a lost loved one, duh, is the way it doles out its exposition, which is to say, oh god the timed text. You need to click to get each new paragraph to display, and even once you click the lines fill in letter by letter, making the buildup feel excruciating. I’ll admit that there are a few places where the added drama of delay enhances the narrative, but the omnipresence of this frustrating mechanic is the worst thing about INPUT PROCESS – imagine how much less fun Frankenstein would be if you spent half your time reading it waiting to actually read it!

Fortunately there are some high points too. Beyond the generally lavish production values, the writing is up to the challenge of depicting two different attempts to capture the same character in silicon, with the less-sophisticated iteration sporting noticeable LLM-style tics. The worldbuilding is also nicely shaded in; for plot purposes, all that’s important is that kitbashing AIs is possible but not exactly legal, but there are enough glancing details about the way this cyberpunk-y world works to make it feel lived in. The final segment of the game also is more engaging that what came before – some of this is down to choices finally starting to appear, but it isn’t just a matter of interactivity as such; the last couple of scenes focus more on the emotional dynamics of the situation rather than trying to prolong the aura of mystery, and gain power by that choice. Sure, the protagonist’s psychology here is familiar enough (stop me if you’ve ever read a story about a precocious genius with self-esteem issues who fears getting close to anyone!), but the AI’s reactions are the focus, and lead to an endgame that’s more about feeling out whether a newly-constructed relationship with the protagonist might be plausible or desirable, based on what level of sharing you choose to engage in.

And to the game’s credit, it does allow you to skip to other choice points once you finish the old-fashioned way, which takes much of the sting out of having to face all that timed text a second or, heavens forfend, third time if you want to see how things change in the other endings. All of them are ambiguous to one degree or another since this isn’t a rainbows-and-sunshine kind of game, but they all do open up space for the protagonist and her creations to escape the sort of destructive cycle that consumed Frankenstein and his monster, one way or another, which I suppose can count as hopeful if you catch it in the right kind of light. Of course, in this day and age a story about AI that posits them as specific characters striving to understand humanity, not brainless purveyors of cheerily-delivered slop, feels a bit old fashioned, but as my son’s fascination with Frankenstein indicates, there’s a reason we keep going back to the classics.