Who's Lila?

A strange and excitingly experimental experience, with cool art (unfortunately, my understanding is that the faces are AI generated) and optional palettes, plus plenty of fun twists, but also a frustrating, slow, repetitive, and clunky game. I will say upfront that I still recommend it. Starting off with the weaknesses, the game requires you to replay scenes a LOT, but without any meaningful way to speed/skip through things (something the player has to make up for by making new saves constantly and cursing themselves when they forget). There is a function to double click on doors (anything with the feet icon on hover) to teleport through rather than having to watch your character slowly amble over, but this doesn't solve much when most scenes have doors that don't register as doors in the games UI, so you're still having to walk across most areas. Normal on a first pass, dreary on a second, annoying on a fifth. In terms of implementation, there's also a function to press space to highlight clickable things, and this had a lot of bugs for me too. The writing is not localised the best, I think. It's an intentionally obtuse and cryptic mess of jargon and nonsense, orbiting around interesting themes of psychology and experience and memetic influence, but the translation doesn't sell the high-mindedness of this in the best way, instead feeling clunky or "philosophy for dummies" at various points. A tighter translation would've helped the game feel a lot more ominous and maintained the atmosphere better. The core mechanic of manipulating your characters face was intriguing, but the fact this is timed, and the unintuitiveness of certain emotions, mean it can be frustrating, and the split UI between the face and the point and click/dialogue interface meant I felt like I was missing the visual clues of the characters face reacting when I was reading the dialogue. These issues meant that after finding about five or six tarot cards—roughly two hours in—I gave up, the friction sufficient to make me want to use a guide, and using that I completed the rest of the game. This robbed me of some of the satisfaction of solving puzzles, but also, mercifully, robbed me of many wasted hours trying to figure out which dialogue points give different tidbits with slightly different series of faces (and frankly I don't think I would've found a lot of clues, certainly not before giving up). From this more detached perspective, it's hard not to be impressed by how many things Garage Heathen tries to do with the narrative and the puzzles. This review doesn't have story spoilers, but you might want to stop reading here if you want to experience it completely blind. The save files work as timestamps with the game remembering everything, or the way you unlock a special permanent save file at one point. The game also surprises you by requiring you to treat it as a multimedia project. What do I mean? Well, at numerous points the game copied things to my clipboard and told me to google them. Twitter profiles with patterns and addresses needed in the game, Itch links with vital info in, so on. One link was a passworded site that, when unlocked (and the password is hidden in the game files!), gives a pdf of a fake scientific paper that has clues to unlock something in the game. It requires installing a second software, putting it's icon on your desktop, and running it alongside the game (multiple endings aren't possible without doing this). At one point the game ordered me to read some wikipedia articles, before giving me some fake news site pages that never existed. One clue required changing my computers date, another required intentionally corrupting a file. Would this have felt needlessly difficult and frustrating without a guide? To me, yes, absolutely lol. With the guide I was happy appreciated the novelty of all the hoops. The game fizzles out at the end, with most of the narrative climaxes or tense points or satisfying moments having happened a while ago, depending on how you play it. It refuses to give any clear answers (just some vague ones that I won't spoil here), and by this point that felt like a narratively sensible choice, if rather anticlimactic.