Developer: Zachtronics
Rrp: £11.39 (Gog.com, Humblebundle and Steam)
Eliza is a visual novel, a fairly short one (lasting about five hours for a playthrough) that is fully voiced, has some very nice artwork and great characterisation. I think that’s about it for the basic information because there are far more interesting things about this game than its genre or length. Eliza is one of those games where I have taken enough notes down that I could put this as something that isn’t a blast review, however the issue is that I’d spend most of my time not talking about the game itself but instead its themes.
This game at its core is about mental health and technology, it raises a lot of interesting questions that the player will have to contend with before the game is over. My own feelings toward about this are… complicated. You see, the games title Eliza is the name of an AI that offers mental health counselling. The company behind this AI hire untrained people to act as ‘proxies’ (which is the job title), these proxies will read off of a script that the Eliza AI gives them and are never allowed to deviate from it under threat of losing their job. The whole idea being that people are more willing to speak to another person than an electronic avatar. The part that made me feel uncomfortable about this it was with the first client that our lead character (Evelyn) meets. The client wanted to feel an actual human connection and was clearly in destress and after a while, he begged and pleaded for Evelyn, not Eliza, to respond to him. So what happened? The AI has you follow a script where you pretend to be going off script and he falls for it. This is the moment where the game made me mutter under my breath “oh, no.”
The thing is mental health is a very complex subject and its not one I’d want to wade too far into the waters of. One thing I do recognise as someone looking from the outside in is that there are too few people who work within that field and the waiting times can be weeks or months. This is where I could see something like Eliza being used as a stop gap measure or a way to help people with less severe issues. But that’s not the case in this game, they want to make it be an actual councillor even going so far as to recommend medication (which in some cases I’m sure was not needed at all).
Like I said at the beginning of this… well its hard to call it a review really this game is a visual novel and though I haven’t played that many I can tell this is a good one. I highly recommend it but I warn that its not what I’d call ‘fun’ per say, its engaging and though provoking definitely but, for me at least, it wasn’t fun.
