Event[0]
Ocelot Society – Windows, Mac
From the robot in Metropolis to 2001’s HAL, the clinical, dispassionate AI has been one of sci-fi’s most unnerving villains. But an even spookier figure than an omniscient, inhuman intelligence is that of the humble, also-ran chatbot. Just look up some transcripts of Turing test competition entrants. You won’t find any eerily perfect machines looking to replace their flawed creators. Instead, their creepiness lies in how they hold a mirror up to our own self-perception. Supposedly designed to mimic normal conversation, they show the most faithfully abstracted humanity by parroting back what is said to them, obfuscating when possible, and just changing the subject when in a panic. Not exactly a glowing reflection of our own selves.
Event[0] is a game that pinpoints the horror of this simulated sentience. Set in an alternate present where decades of human endeavour have focused more on rocketry and space travel than on computing, you play as a stranded astronaut forced to dock with an abandoned recreational space station orbiting a Jovian moon. Your only hope of getting home is with the assistance of the station’s computer, Kaizen. This is done by interacting with it through text-input terminals. Using your keyboard, you can enter anything you like, with Kaizen (hopefully) able to parse any queries or requests you submit, and helping you on your way accordingly. Of course, things don’t progress quite so smoothly. The computer vacillates between being friendly and sinister, and seems unable, or unwilling, to explain what happened to the station’s crew.
Mostly, though, it’s just broadly incommunicative, refraining from engaging substantially with you in favour of pursuing its own mysterious agenda. So far, so GLaDOS. But while Kaizen at first has the vaguely chilly menace of a classic evil AI, it gradually seems to morph into a benign puppet for its creators’ own malign intentions. As usual, human nature is the real baddie, with hubris and narrow-mindedness its most potent weapons. Reading through the station’s crew logs is more worrying than Kaizen’s over-familiarity, which instead borders on endearing. As the demonstration videos of robotics company Boston Dynamics so often show, AI creatures might be creepy, but the humans who casually toss banana skins in their paths are just evil.
Fugitive
Designed by Tim Fowers
Compact card games seem to be going through a surprisingly fruitful period right now. Alongside the rapid rise of board- and miniature-based games, and the enduring popularity of deeper collectible ones such as Magic, micro-games have been enjoying their own design innovations. *Love Letter*, Tides of Time and Skull all do remarkably clever things with limited decks. And now Tim Fowers’ Fugitive, while not quite as svelte as those examples, offers its own twist on bluffing and deduction.
Using a few dozen cards numbered from zero to 42, the game pits one player, the fugitive, against an opponent, the marshal. It’s the fugitive’s objective to draw cards and place them face-down in a row as “hideouts” of ever-increasing value; the marshal has to guess which cards have been played. There are limitations on what the fugitive can do on a given turn, though: the played card must have a value no more than three higher than their previous one, unless they also discard some cards in order to “sprint” a little further. This allows the marshal to make an educated guess, or often a clean deduction, as to the value of each hideout. If they ever manage to uncover every hideout, they’ve caught the fugitive; if the fugitive ever gets to play the 42 card, they escape.
Currently available only as a free print-and-play game before its full release later in the year, Fugitive is a startlingly elegant and well-realised design. The tension of watching the marshal whittle down your escape routes doesn’t quite reach jumping-off-a-dam levels of excitement, but for a simple 43-card deck, it comes remarkably close.
Like a Boss
Ramon Salazar
Resident Evil 4
Even among the Resident Evil series’ extensive and characterful rogues’ gallery, Ramon Salazar stands out. Sure, he may not be scary, intelligent, strong, witty, sinister or otherwise intimidating, but man, oh, man… What was I talking about, again? Oh, right: he certainly is, if nothing else, deeply annoying. Despite looking like some ageless imp, he is, by his own high-pitched admission, only 20-years old. He eventually fights the player only after having his body subsumed into a giant, betentacled creature. Bloody millennials.
Words: Leo Devlin
