Artificial Iridescence

This story started with potential it even had me emotionally gripped. Then I was quickly dropped into confusion and disappointment in the lead up to the ending. I suppose it was a little funny how things dramatically changed. Glad it was free.

Well, I always belived that 2D is better than 3D.

Really short VN which doesn't bring anything outstanding but will occupy your time for 20mn.

Artificial Iridescence is not a game. It's an advertisement/demo for an e-book (And e-books aren't games either!!!) It's a common mistake when unfamiliar with Steam to launch demos/advertisements as full games on Steam instead of tagging them correctly as demos. Here's the instructions for putting a demo up on Steam, to demonstrate that there is a correct process for this, which hasn't been followed here: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos Visual novels/e-books are tedious at best... imagine the best novel you ever read, be that Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or 2001: A Space Odyssey or Twilight (if you have terrible taste in literature), but then translate that to a format where the words dribble out and you have to click your mouse every time you wanted to read the next sentence, instead of just turning the pages. You'd think it was garbage. Now imagine that experience, but with much worse writing (because if these guys could write professionally, they'd be published authors and this would be on shelves in bookstores, and they wouldn't have to pay Valve $100 to self-publish this on Steam), and you have your average Steam e-book. You can get complete, free, better quality books and comics online or from public libraries. Steam isn't a comic book store, neither is it Netflix, it's for games. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle. It's impossible for me to recommend things to PC gamers that aren't really games. While it might seem like an inocuous mistake, publishing demos and advertisements as if they are full games is misleading and in some ways harmful. This advertisement is taking up marketing space and visibility that would be better made available to a developer that's done the right thing and created a full game. Instead, that visibility is given over to a demo/advert that's been published incorrectly and is polluting the marketplace. It's unclear if this mistake was made through incompetence or a deliberate intent to mislead gamers, but at the end of the day, I can only recommend full, correctly published games to gamers. Because this is just a demo, because it's not a game, and because what it's advertising is also not a game, I can't recommend it. This is just polluting Steam.

To all players unfamilliar with the AppSir game universe, you must understand a few things in order to not flush your expectations down the drain: - They generally come in two flavors of short games: Platformer and Visual Novel; - Creepypasta informal narrative style, which expand the universe by a little each time; - Meta elements on the platformers, as if the player is part of the canon universe too; - Many unusual elements on theirs platformer games, like supposed bugs and such, are actually a feature; - Some of their canon content can only be found on their site or on their YT channel, contributing to a very Meta experience. - AppSir games are, so far, FREE. So now that you know more or less what to expect, to the GAME: It digs a little deeper on the mysteries of AI and human conciousness, and we have to connect the dots with their other work to theorise the truths of that universe, and makes you think about life and death a little bit. I say give them a chance, and check their YT channel to know a bit about the game development on the Philipines too!

Unfortunately Artificial Iridescence is not a good game. Since its a kinetic novel everything within it relies on the writing, which just isn't very well crafted. And I'm not talking about superficial stuff like grammar or structure, but the stuff underneath, the things that make or break stories. First and foremost the writing in AI is competently dry and consists almost entirely of dialogs - he said / she said exchanges with very little personality. This lack of character exploration results in a conclusion that is hilariously nonsensical, and very clearly something that the author wanted to happed, rather than being a natural progression of things. Think of Artificial Iridescence as an elaborate "creepypasta" rather than a proper story. 4/10

Impressive impression the game has given me some great ideas and content here. Brilliant 👏

An amazing little game. If you have a 10-15 mins to spare I would highly recommend it.