This came out yesterday on PS4, hopefully elsewhere too. Odd since Tuesday is normal release day but anyway…

been playing a bit this morning and it’s really, really good. Not horror as such - there’s no blood, at least not yet, but a really great sense of winding tension and.. discomfort. The basic plot is you play S.A.M., the AI on a ISS style space station helping an astronaut after something bad has happened on the station. You have fixed camera angles and can control electrical stuff, whereas your human companion does the physical stuff. You stuff mostly boils down to searching for things and interactive puzzles to unlock doors, authorise venting compartments etc. Some of them are time sensitive with no tutorial, which is a bit of a pain but does help to ramp the panic / tension a bit.

In the initial phase it pays a lot like the film ‘Gravity’, but with an interesting coop dynamic. You’re an AI, but how do you play it? By the book, or do you tweak things to help Emma (the astronaut) because sometimes the correct response is going to make it harder for her? Do you communicate with emotion and inflection, or with the completely passionless voice of a machine?

All this of itself works really well. It would be an interesting exercise just as that. But then, I was playing the straight robot - no cheating, no chatting and reporting in the impersonal - and there’s a big reveal (which I won’t spoil) and then a bit of scripted dialogue which ends something like..

Emma : “Sam, how did this happen?”
SAM : (and this is the only option) “I don’t know.”

Oh. fuck.

I love it already, it’s a wonderfully different experience to pretty much anything else I’ve played recently and the ‘just about now’ sci fi setting / environment is obviously very much my thing. It makes you think not only in the moment to moment of puzzle solving but in the longer scale of SAM as the character you’re playing - am I just the machine? Am I ‘the good guy’? Am I actually a malevolent force? It asks questions of you internally no ‘shoot the cool gun’ game ever would, or even could. It’s already at the point where I really want to find out what happens next but I also… really don’t.