Human Within Review

There’s a lot we don’t know about the human brain. It’s an organic supercomputer capable of incredible feats and calculations, mathematically, emotionally, and intellectually, as well as nuance and subtlety. The advent of AI means we are creeping ever closer to replicating the surface level experience of what it means to be human into technology, a simulacrum which is likely to grow more advanced with each iteration. It’s an uncomfortable prospect to consider — will humanity use this powerful new tool for good or ill?

The opportunity to explore the grey areas of the ethics surrounding the merging of human and artificial consciousness has therefore never been so ripe for plucking, especially when every bloody website you visit has a chatbot attempting to fill in for an actual human being, and when job boards are littered with roles advertising for people to train AI to sound more natural. Human Within had a rich mine to plunder, a fact which makes the final game all the more disappointing.

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Combining 3D graphics and 2D film, the initial impressions are good. You’re immersed in an interface which wouldn’t look out of place in an episode of 24, with multiple screens displaying a combination of code and camera feeds. Central to this is Nyla, a developer who is working in a lab alongside her comatose sister Linh. It seems that they have both been taken hostage by an evil megacorp billionaire named Blake Ohlson who wants to use the technology the sisters have been working on — named Pasithea — for his own purposes. 

The idea behind Pasithea is that it can tap into the brain and use its incredible processing power to create a supercomputer unlike anything seen before, which also involves merging a person’s consciousness into the digital space. Now, Nyla is forced to use Linh’s link to Pasithea to try and find a way out of their confinement.

The story is approached from two timelines. In the current timeline, you are assisting Nyla in trying to escape. This involves roping in a German shoplifter named Sean with a promise of wiping his record and giving him a fresh start, if he can make his way into Blake’s building and rescue them. Gameplay elements include locating specific targets in 3D models of the city and building, and recreating and exploring environments and the movements of people within them by fast forwarding and rewinding time. This second mechanic would be fun if the movement around the recreated environment was smooth. Unfortunately, a combination of teleport and direct movement makes the whole affair incredibly clunky. This is underscored even more by the need to locate and scan certain items or people in each environment, at a specific point in time. The playback is achieved by rotating the Meta’s controller one way or another, but this then clashes with the need to move directly to the line of sight of your objective which results in a very messy experience. There is a third, more frequent task in this timeline: pattern matching cube faces to recover corrupt or missing data. You’re essentially lining up increasingly complex domino faces to illustrate hacking, and the more it happens, the less interesting it becomes. Even when Nyla urgently states that you need to hurry up during one of these tasks towards the end of the game, there are no consequences for taking your time which negates any real stake in proceedings.  

In the flashback timeline, you see the events leading up to Nyla and Linh’s capture, from Linh’s point of view. The only interaction you have in the story here is to make a choice between two options at certain points, by looking to the left or right (something that is not particularly clear when you first experience it). It’s the kind of thing Late Shift did, only far less frequently and with far less impact. 

Speaking of Late Shift, it’s hard not to draw unfavourable comparisons in almost every area given both offer interactive FMV experiences at their core. The acting in Human Within ranges from passable (Nyla) to downright awful (Sean and all of the other bit part characters). Blake is a charismatic psychopath, but the character is written so erratically that it’s almost impossible to sympathise with him or anyone he talks to. Linh’s decision to stay involved with him is completely at odds with the actions of a normal person: in one scene he smashes his plate off the table at a restaurant in a fit of rage, in another later scene Linh is stroking his hand and empathising with him. The choices you make as Linh don’t follow a logical pattern either; you may as well pick one at random and see what happens rather than try to guess what a normal human response would be. A scene where you have to decide whether to tell Blake about a phone call from Nyla is a perfect example of a character acting totally unrealistically. 

How Pasithea’s technology has been achieved by the sisters is never explained. In fact, detail as a whole is thin on the ground throughout the three hours you spend with Human Within. The pair start the game pitching their technology to a bored room of three people in some sort of mini convention. If Pasithea was so powerful, surely there’d be far more interest in at least learning what it could potentially achieve? It screams of keeping acting costs low on the production front, which is odd, because aside from the odd typo, the game feels very well made. You can interact with all of the different feeds in Nyla’s view by grabbing them and bringing them close to you. General manipulation of objects, though limited, is smooth. The overall presentation is great too — it’s often hard to distinguish which parts of a set are real and which are CGI. There are seeds of something wonderful here, both for VR and the future of fully immersive narratives.

But it all comes back to the story, the acting and the writing, none of which hold up. At times the dialogue is so hilariously awful, even Mark Rylance would have struggled to come out of this unscathed. There are five possible endings based on the choices you make in Linh’s timeline, and to see them all after the first playthrough you’ll need to run through the game multiple times. A scene selection option lets you jump directly back into the branching scenes to make different choices, but there’s no possibility of skipping dialogue — or indeed anything — so you’ll then have to go through every subsequent scene (and pattern matching task) again. And as flashy as the game is at times, the interactive parts of this interactive movie are not gripping enough to keep you hooked.