Choice of Robots

A choose your own adventure book but digital and considerably more elaborate. Probably not for everyone, but well worth your time if that sounds appealing.

I'm giving this one a thumbs up even though I don't think I could play it again for personal reasons, but it's just objectively a really well done game, and I quite enjoyed playing most of it and finished it in about a day. Enough other people have already detailed its strengths (branching, interesting choices, simple but effective stats) that I'm not going to spend too much time there and instead talk about the one thing that prevents me from wanting to replay it: theme. This probably won't bother most players but I found it a little disturbing how the robots were treated in the game. I guess I'm just very pro-human and it's long been a pet peeve of mine when stories make it sound like machines can ever come close to the value and complexity of a human life. While I can get over that for stories in other mediums, it felt a little extra disturbing for a story written in the second person, where *I'm* the one encouraged to, for example, go on dates with a hunk of metal that I myself designed, maybe even get married to it. Earlier on in the game, I thought the choices would have enough nuance that I could avoid some of this content. This is true to a degree: at the start of the game, I was given the ability to take a firm stance in saying that my robot was not human, that it could never match human intelligence, and that it was in fact an "it" and not a "he" or a "she". These kinds of choices are sprinkled throughout but I still felt a bit railroaded into accidentally creating a sentient being with emotions and free will and even the desire to procreate, which just felt off to me, especially with how I was attempting to roleplay a pro-human kind of MC. I found my ending to be honestly disturbing as a result and it kept me from wanting to replay the game, because I don't want to feel guilted about how I treat my robot. Again, this is more of a personal pet peeve, though I do think that the game missed out on an opportunity to ask some bigger questions about the nature of humanity and whether or not a robot can really be considered some kind of valuable life and, if so, what that says about humans (e.g., maybe if robots are valuable despite being nothing but machines, does that mean maybe no human is truly valuable because we're all machines?). The game sort of tries to ask these kinds of questions, but I guess I just wanted a bit more. This game was written years before the current deluge of AI content but there are so many obvious paralells and these themes are increasingly relevant to think about, Probably a decent book club book if those exist for IFs though.