Little Learning Machines

It's okay I guess, too bad there are only 5 slots for learnings and that you're held by the hand most of the time

I don't know if they forgot the game, or I just installed a cryptominer, or if this whole thing is an allegory on the uselessness of "AI" or what. Just some bullets and my experience summed up: - Fired up the game, and it sort of presents like a flash game, which wasn't awesome. - First thing it did before anything else... was download and install python stuff. This tracks I think, because to my understanding, a lot of ML/AI stuff tends to be python based. But also it's super weird that the first thing your game is doing is downloading external libraries/repos/etc. Like maybe bundle functional libraries with the game, and push out updates using the game update functionality as needed, through steam? I know devs often take this "just setup an external link and let it update whenever!" attitude, but it's weird for a game to do this. - I accidentally exit the game twice, because in the option menu, where the bottom option in like --- every other game for 30 years, would be the button to exit the options screen, they put a huge button to exit the game. I guess that's on me. - I check options as I notice when it ran, it did a bunch of screen rez changes on my system, usually a sign the game didn't run on my native rez. Find no graphics options at all, and move on. - Start a new game. An adorable crystal is stranded on an island? But a new thing/friend blows in! Through happenstance, that friend starts walking around. We want our friend to collect crystals on the beach! - Instead of collecting them on the beach though, we go to the "cloud".... there, our friend can collect crystals to their hearts content infinitely I guess. I'm not sure why they called this area the "cloud", but I assume they are being on the nose with it and trying to teach me about ML. - I'm guided to input some basic instructions for the new friend, using a metric called "Love" to encourage them to follow the instructions (it feels like a weighting system - like it will do things that award 10 love before it does things that award 1 love) - Using this, I make an instruction that rewards 1 love, for collecting an item, and that item is the crystals. It starts collecting crystals, haphazardly/randomly at first, and ever a minute or so, in a much more efficient and purposeful pattern. Each time the crystals are all collected, the magic of the cloud creates a new area with crystalls he can collect. That's it, that's the game. It's a screensaver. I let it run for about 10m and nothing happened. I cannot give new instructions or stop the current instructions or interact in any way with the screen, I can only bring up the menu and exit. I do so, I then wrote this review, and now I'm going to refund this and hope it wasn't malware.