While this is clearly a very niche product, I thought I would exactly the type of person who would enjoy it. I've enjoyed a number visual novels, I like verbose, slow games, I have an strong interest in both AI and psychology, and I also have substantial personal experience as a recipient of mental health therapy. I was wrong. This was a frustrating, tedious, and ultimately unsatisfying and disappointing experience. I almost never review games, but given the very positive rating and so few reviews, I felt I had to leave some comments.
Pros:
* It's about very unique and interesting subject
* Everything is voiced, and the voices are reasonably well done
* You can go back and forth to review the current dialogue session
CONS:
* The game is about 99% dialogues between you and one other character, and I personally found the vast majority of these dreadfully dull. Pretending to be a serious therapist in a very real-world setting is apparently not for me. There are only 5 NPCs in the game, and they'll all kind of samey in that they're nearly always being very polite, well educated, proper, controlled, and professional, which gets old fast. Even the AI! The only times things got briefly interesting is when either I or they decided to actually to drop the pretense and actually allow some emotions in.
* The primary game mechanic appears to involve maintaining a sufficiently high trust rating with 3 of those 5 NPCs, while remaining professional. Different choices affect different NPCs by varying amounts. Oddly, no rating ever seems to drop, instead the threshold of what's sufficient keeps rising through the game. That's strange, but should still work. However, I found this system quite frustrating. Ratings of characters not in the current conversation are constantly being affected, presumably because all of them get a copy of your notes after. It's rather hard to keep them all up and not particular fun to try. And I frequently didn't see why what was said affected a particular rating at all.
* 4 of the NPCs all get notes after each AI therapy session, and then proceed to kibitz (via email or meeting) and tell you how they think you're doing. They often seem to be at odds how to proceed and it's not clear whether you can trust what any of them have to say. This was just another source of annoyance and frustration. At certain points you can only talk to one or another, and are thus forced to miss opportunities in the other branch. At one point I wanted to put the AI on "medication" (don't think about that too hard), but chose to talk to the "wrong" NPC first, and never got the chance to actually try meds for the rest of the game. Very annoying, since my initial therapy was not working out.
* The AI's personality was just not that interesting to me. Sci-Fi is way past the stage where the mere existence of an AGI is in itself interesting. It's struggling with very typical mental health issues like any ordinary human, and much of the time is could basically be any other regular, neurotic patient. It only has a disembodied non-animated head, and things feel weird when discussion turns to "medication" and "independent living". It's not all bad, but it's not especially great, given this should have been the highlight of the game. At good half of the dialogues involves characters other than the AI itself, and those are pretty routine.
* The game takes place in 2048, but you'd hardly know it. Obviously they're trying to justify the existence of human-level, possibly sentient AI. But very little else in the game suggests that it's nearly 30 years in the future. They should have chosen 2028, it would have been more believable overall.
* The game is basically broken at 4K resolution in that longer emails spill off the bottom of the screen, making them unreadable. This happens rather frequently. I had to switch to very low res to read them, then back. How this gets past QA in the 2020s is hard to believe. It also happens in one two other UI panels (e.g. the collectables). It even seemed to happen at other higher resolutions. I have a very standard Win10 setup and don't have such problems with other games.
* The UI for the "Report" app in the laptop interface is just plain broken at any resolution, with the text and controls of two panels overlapping. It didn't seem to inhibit play though.
* There is only one save-file per playthrough, which is checkpointed automatically, so as far as I could tell you can't go back beyond the latest checkpoint, you'd have to start over.
* There are a handful of time-waster minigames, but they're all incredibly simplistic, repetitive and thus dull. I don't know why they even bothered. They're easy to ignore.
The therapy simulation seems reasonable and realistic, and perhaps an actual therapist would really enjoy this, but it never became much fun for me. There are definitely times where it could be triggering for people with lived experience, so don't take the warnings lightly.
While it was obvious that I wasn't having much fun, I knew the game was very short (far less than 10 hours for a single playthrough). I try to finish most games I start, so I pressed on. Eventually I reached a point where every decision I could make from my single savepoint led to a slightly different, but still bad ending. There are presumably good endings, but I would have to start over from scratch, and there is no way I'll ever put myself through that again. It would feel extremely repetitive, and most choices I'd make wouldn't change much at all. Besides, it's not clear what I did wrong, I tried to make good, responsible decisions, but felt unrewarded. I think even a second playthrough would result in some type of failure. And I don't think even actual professional therapists would have any better luck with navigating the complex decision trees involved.
I did learn that I'm very glad that I'm not a psychotherapist IRL!
