Can Androids Pray

[got_quiet]

Name: Can Androids Play
Status: Complete
Site: https://scarletcatalie.itch.io/can-androids-pray-red
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Gen
Description: Doomed soldiers chat about death and then die



This is a ten to fifteen minute game with a single basic concept. It's reminiscent of a chapter in a sci-fi compilation. I've always liked conceptional short stories so I enjoyed this game, even though it was so brief. But because it's short it's hard to review without just straight up describing the whole plot, so I'm basically going to do that.

The game is built in unity, which allows the devs to create a nice 3d, atmospheric scene of a desolate landscape in which you and another mech pilot have crash landed. Both of your mechs are disabled and when the sun comes up your mechs are going to explode. So you're fucked. The whole game is these two mechs chatting together, rather abrasively, about their situation. At some point this conversation turns to the concept of God, whether he exists, what he's like, and after a certain revelation in the game, what his feeling may be on a particular subject. At the end you're given an option of basically two ways to die. You can sit in your mech and explode or you can open the cabin and die to the atmosphere. The choices are given meaning in the prior dialog.

Like all good spec fic there's a lot of what ifs that come up in the course of this short conversation, though since the speculation is theological in nature it's kind of easy to take a relatively simple approach to one of the problems if you're an atheist. The second question expands from that to the concept of personhood, which is a question you can ask whether you believe in God or not.

I can't say that the ideas in this game are particularly groundbreaking, and the idea is really all it has, though the writing is fine and the music sets the mood well. But I don't know if I would spend money on something like this. The dialog elements are pretty meaningless except for maybe the last, and the story would do just as well as a short two page chapter in a larger book. So if you're really into conceptual sci-fi maybe go for it but otherwise probably skip it.