Silicon Dreams | cyberpunk interrogation

A very interesting cyberpunk interrogation/interviewing game. You're an android whose job is to interview other androids and figure out if they're faulty and if they should be destroyed entirely, or if they can be let go free, or only be sent for maintenance. You also sometimes interview humans. As you may have guessed, the game is all about morals and philosophical questions: for example, can you punish an android that killed a human if it was the human engineers' fault that he had faulty components? The way you talk to the android affects how co-operative it will be. You sometimes will need to manipulate to get some answers. Sometimes you need to gain its trust, sometimes you need to make it afraid, other times you may need to trigger its anger. To add to this, your corporate overlords will review and rate all the cases afterwards. They also sometimes make demands and may ask you to act against your own morals: the corporation can, for example, tell you to send the subject android to be destroyed and then lie on the answer form to justify the decision, just to calm down a bad PR situation. Do you let the android be sent to maintenance because it's not actually faulty enough …

Not for me.

It's OK. The plot is quite predictable. It's alright if you've got like, nothing else to do/play.

I'm of mixed opinion about this game. It was interesting and I got to a ending. But on trying to replay it a couple of times, I couldn't get the opposite ending. I think the problem is that too many things are initiated by requiring a certain amount of time pass in certain interrogations. This means that if you are replaying and don't need to re-read everything you just read, you just have to leave the game sitting there doing nothing in every interrogation for a while to make sure you don't miss events. This makes the game extremely frustrating to try and replay. So I never reached the ending I wanted.

Very absorbing with interesting narratives and perspectives. Trying to tread the line between corpo compliance and 'I feel you man' during interrogations is a delicate act. Runs with that oppressive 'there are no happy endings in Night City' vibe. As I tactically fried another helpless android in a chair before clocking out for the day I often wondered if you my subversive plans were really helping at all, or if it would be all for naught anyway.

The game isn't too complex, but it's a nice visual novel experience with branching paths. I liked the fact that I wasn't railroaded into playing a revolutionary android savior and I was able to perform entirely according to the sinister and nihilistic company policies. I didn't enjoy the game "namedropping" obvious references to Blade Runner and the likes. I don't think it was necessary because the writing was good enough to stand on its own feet and the different scenarios exploring strained relationships between androids and their owners had some fresh takes. I'm not sure if I'd recommend the game to anyone who's not a fan of android stories. But if you like the genre, Silicon Dreams features a classic setting that has the potential to make the player feel uncomfortable about their choices. Don't expect great visuals or any voice acting - the game is text based, and I think that in order to really enjoy it the player has to actually want to roleplay an android.