This game has basically everything I wanted from ERROR: Human Not Found. The premise is quite similar: It's a sci-fi investigation game where you must solve the disappearance of a prominent software engineer with the help of his creation, the first self-aware robot. However, it addresses basically all my complaints with Human Not Found with aplomb. Your robot buddy actually acts like a robot and ruminates on their sapience in non-trivial ways. There is even an entire scene where they reflect on what their gender is and if they even want one, including the discovery of an earlier sapient AI that did insist on a specific gender presentation and ruminating on why they feel more indifferent and what that might mean! (And this is an ending spoiler, but I appreciated getting to talk to all the newly-sapient robots in the epilogue instead of pulling the curtain over the brave new world, as well as the acknowledgement that robots who are built only for simple tasks might not appreciate sapience. This stuff is complicated!)
The human characters were also excellent here, and there are even humans with gene mods in addition to cyborgs to really up the transhumanism. In particular, there is a bevy of gay and genderqueer characters, and not in a tacked-on way like in Human Not Found. That queer presence was really essential to the story's themes of personhood, identity, and self-discovery. It always makes me roll my eyes when future sci-fi does some parable about the personhood of AIs or cyborgs or whatever but there are no gay people to be seen. The implication that real people who exist today are more taboo than future aliens or whatever inevitably hamstrings whatever point the story tries to make. You need to have a diverse cast to make this kind of story work, to acknowledge this personhood debate doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Oh, and there is flavor text. So much flavor text. A little too much, if anything; I disliked that I had to interact multiple times to see everything. But otherwise, it's very delicious.
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