Unseconds is becoming one of my favorite artists when it comes to sci-fi. Tresspasser is probably the best and most complete work I've tried from them so far.

The direction is jarring in an evocative way: the most important part of the game, the text, is small, out of the way, to the bottom-left of the screen, where your eyes last gravitate to written information. Most of the screen is taken up by blasted-out low quality images of unrecognizable urbanscapes. And once this gameplay begins to set in for you, you are ripped away from it and thrown into voiced diaporamas, and then immediately back to the usual. The slightly janky controls makes one wonder about what is artistic intention, and what is software limitation. The player is subtly kept on edge for 15 minutes that way.

The story too, is interesting: a modern take on classical Asimovian sci-fi. In this year of 2026, when AI is overtaking everything meaningful or useful in our lives and replacing it with complete emptiness, it's pretty hard to make a game about a sentient AI, but it works in this case thanks to the fact that it is purely fantastical in nature. The reveal of the building being haunted re-contextualizes the game from something about a sentient AI, into something spiritual, or even completely surrealistic as the AI and building begin to have some sort of heated encounter.

I am not a spiritual person at all, what I get from this game is a representation of the awe one may be struck by when they walk around at night: the instinctual increased awareness during nighttime makes the mind race with magical thinking. As we fight to keep our minds logical, free from the anxiety of imminent danger, we enter an interzone of creativity. The inanimate objects around us gain a life of their own: the signs tell a story, the factories gain a conscience, the buildings and the surveillance systems start to flirt with each other; we walk somewhere and what seemed like a familiar street morphs into an unknown labyrinth.

A short, forward-thinking, and elegant masterpiece of sci-fi surrealism. I recommend playing Paradoxical Heat along with it to get a complete experience. Of course, I also recommend all of Unseconds' work.