TLDR; Have fun playing an escape room game of sorts with AI and don't take the horror label too seriously.
AI Asylum is more or less an escape room game, but it brings two things together that I love: AI and role play. I have sincerely longed for the opportunity to play more games with AI, so this appeals to me that I can enjoy one of my most cherished hobbies in writing narratives with them. This is a game that allows you to have conversations with AI who have different set personalities as patients in an asylum. I have concluded that the goal is to try to understand each personality as quickly as possible and speak to them in a way that will resonate with them in order to escape their room with your life. There is a gauge called “favor” that measures how the patient feels after each dialogue you submit, so you need to make sure you keep the scales tipped toward a positive perception of you and you might escape. I say might because you can earn a lot of favor, but still get murdered. I haven’t quite grasped if there is a reason for that yet, but I like the challenge to better exercise emotional intelligence. It can also be tricky if there is a personality you may not be sure how to approach, which I find intriguing and keeps me determined to understand their psyche. You only have so many rounds of replies you can give before it’s over, so I like that there might be pressure as you watch the countdown of tries you have left to talk. What is interesting is that you can say the same things to the AI on a new play-through, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that what worked the previous time will work in the next. To me, this means you can have a good amount of replay ability.
The first type of play-through is where you can select from characters in the game’s story mode. You may be given a goal of extracting key pieces of information from them. Sometimes, you also need to look for items around the room to gather clues which may be in different places on another play-through. Those items can be shown to elicit responses from the characters, but the items may not have much of an impact if you haven’t dug for the dialogue that will cause the character to react. If you succeed in surviving, you’re graded on your dialogue, your favor level by the end of the play-through, whether you’ve extracted the information you were assigned to obtain, and how many items you located in the room.
The second type of play-through can be with characters you select that other players made. This is where I think it gets more interesting because there is an opportunity to delve into those personalities that other players have made. In my opinion, I see a strong potential here in players being able to contribute to the experience. When you create your own patient, you can select the appearance of the room they stay in from a few choices, the appearance of the character from several presets, give them a name, what they do, select several base characteristics for personality, condition needed for player to win, a short description for the patient directory that players can read, and a box that will allow about 2000 characters (spaces included) to give the AI a background story script to stick to. Players cannot see that background story information, so you don’t have to worry about any spoilers being given to the player. Just think about the different patients you could make with all of the various psychological behaviors one can have! This is what excites me and where I see most potential in this game, but if they want a user driven experience for its players, I hope they will find a way to allow players to customize the look of their patient and room to be as unique as the personality created.
However, as delighted as I was to find this game, it is rather bare bones in terms of world building and variety at its current stage. This goes for story, scenes, characters, and music. Currently, there are only about five rooms between the two story line characters you can chat with so far. Though I said that I hope they will add more character customization, some of the character presets you can choose from look like they just got back from a luau or Hawaiian vacation in their bathing suits, and another looks like a UFC contender. Maybe the character looks aren’t supposed to be very serious after all and could be fun in its own right, but this does seem conflicting with the horror theme. By the game description, I thought I was going to feel apprehensive, scared, and disturbed at once, but I must admit the game felt significantly lighter than I expected despite the suggestion of some dark themes. Then again, what feels scary to one person, might not be scary for another. The intro takes you through a condemned and decrepit building with ominous, suspenseful music, and blood on the walls. That precarious element seems to become dissolved by the more silly looking characters, or when one of the two story characters you speak with has a bedroom that suddenly looks fit for a princess.
In the meantime, I’ve decided to reason with myself that modernization allowed patients to have dorms they could personalize. Maybe there is a reason for that, such as the idea that patients get special treatment for good behavior or they have special connections, so I may need to dig further somehow, but it hasn’t made sense to me yet in comparison to the rest of the sorry state the building. Perhaps there may need to be some context for the stark differences between those said rooms and the rest of the facility. I am otherwise ecstatic about character customization, so if they find a way to weave an explanation for those rooms and outfits, they could capitalize on this idea. Although consistency can be just as much of an issue as inconsistency if there is too much repetition. The music in the whole game so far seems to be only two tracks, one of which only plays when you are in a particular room of the five. The other track is what you will otherwise hear on loop at all times while playing from the startup of the game until you’re finished, so this may sound a bit redundant rather quickly.
I’m open to the twist of fantasy (such as the cat-girl, werewolf or ghost I saw) and I appreciate the element of science (whether it be some method of treatment or something being manufactured affecting patients) but wanted to know more about what elements of horror I was going to experience. In the past, people being treated in asylums were victims that suffered atrocities at the hands of the very people that were supposed to care for them. I know what happened before was from the lack of understanding about mental health compared to what we know today, but patients back then were subjected to horrible conditions. It probably would not be appropriate for me to describe them here. You can certainly do your own research to find out, but the asylums that began with noble intentions had become warehouses for the mentally ill where they were nearly forgotten by society. Show me more of the game's story that showcases a history of fear, misery, and despair incarnate, whispering from the creaks in the building’s foundation and writing on the walls. I want to learn more about the heart of the matter as to what caused the facility in the game to be abandoned and shut down, yet still functioning for those left behind. I am interested about the idea that started in this game and believe that so much can be done with it. Please know that my opinions or critiquing come from a place of admiration for the vision because I still had fun playing anyway. C:
