Best of all, you can play an excellent solitaire minigame that I must admit, probably sapped at least one hour of my total four hour playtime.

You can read Evelyn's emails, text acquaintances on some occasions, and even look at the quote of the day on a meditative app. While Eliza is scant on moment-to-moment narrative-altering decisions, it's not completely without other things to poke around in. The strong voice acting helps keep the Eliza sessions lively, even as you mundanely click through them. And thanks to the handy Chapter select feature, it's easy to hop back in and see all of Eliza's endings while you can play through Eliza again, it's not necessary to see where every potential path leads. It's here where Evelyn's story can diverge dramatically, based on one clearly outlined choice rather than dozens of micro choices you've made along the whole game. Usually this would bother me, but the story and characters of Eliza were so compelling, and the voice acting so excellent, that it kept me glued from start to finish.īy Chapter 6, about three-fourths of the way through Eliza, you get the option to make decisions that aren't just flavor text. Every instance is clearly denoted there's no choice of, 'Who should I hang out with today?' or anything like that. But unlike most visual novels, it's pretty on-rails. In visual novel fashion, you spend time with all of these people, in addition to those you meet during your sessions. Is Eliza actually helping people, or is it only empowering a massive tech conglomerate its dominance over our everyday lives? Evelyn soon finds herself caught between many people a rebellious former co-worker, her manager at the proxy center, and her two former bosses on the Eliza project: one of whom is still at Skandha, the other has left on his own start-up venture. That's the key dilemma of the game, and one of many reasons why Evelyn vanished for three years socially. The more sessions I'd click through, the less I felt like Eliza was doing anything worthwhile. You just listen as people spill reflections of self-doubt, being unfaithful, and suffering from burnout often achingly so, as you have no control over what Evelyn says next.

For a visual novel, there aren't many choices to make in these sessions, at least at first. In most cases, Eliza acts like a mirror, reflecting questions back on the person in front of them. As the AI hears the patient talk, it comes up with answers. The Eliza program requires a human proxy, wearing special glasses that project Eliza's innermost workings. She does so by stealthily going back to work at Skandha as a contract employee, now a proxy for Eliza in counseling sessions. She doesn't know if helping build the advanced intelligence of Eliza was a good or bad thing, and out of curiosity, she goes on a journey to find out. A traumatic incident scatters the team, and three years later, Evelyn's still struggling to put the pieces of her life back together. Evelyn and her team had one goal in mind: they wanted to help people.

In her 20s, she worked at Amazon stand-in Skandha, as part of a scrappy design team that programmed Eliza, a virtual counseling program. How does one reconcile something they put their everything into as it's being used for evil?Įliza, the new visual novel from puzzle game aficionados Zachtronics, reminds me a lot of The Wind Rises. It's a complicated film following Horikoshi's (and by extension Miyazaki's) love of planes, while war and loss surround him. The film, once set to be acclaimed animator Hayao Miyazaki's final feature, was a fictionalized biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, the designer of warplanes used by Japan during World War II. In 2013, Studio Ghibli released The Wind Rises.

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