Eliza is a visual novel from Zachtronics, the gaming company that has produced a huge number of puzzle games. Their games often have a certain atmosphere to them, along with some sort of brief stories, and this visual novel feels very much in the same tonal vein as their other works.
The story focuses on Evelyn, someone who goes to work at a big company called Skandha. The company’sEliza is a visual novel from Zachtronics, the gaming company that has produced a huge number of puzzle games. Their games often have a certain atmosphere to them, along with some sort of brief stories, and this visual novel feels very much in the same tonal vein as their other works.
The story focuses on Evelyn, someone who goes to work at a big company called Skandha. The company’s primary product is Eliza, an AI counselling program, and rather than have people talk to a virtual avatar, instead the company has hired a bunch of outside contractors as “proxies”, whose job it is to read the lines Eliza fed to them and to look empathetic.
It quickly becomes clear that more is going on than it seems – Evelyn is not some random 30-something who is coming back to work after spending years in depression, she was actually the original designer of the Eliza system. Moreover, the system itself is clearly being overhyped – the program is very much like the original Eliza program from the 1960s. It’s frequently pointed out by characters working at the company that they don’t understand Eliza, and as Evelyn points out, it’s because they’re wrong about what the program is on a fundamental level – it isn’t a counseling program at all, it isn’t really even about language recognition.
It’s a mirror.
The story is low-key and subdued, but it is quite interesting topically. It is about someone in a midlife crisis, it addresses a bunch of adult issues like feeling like a failure or not being ready to start a family or whatever else, and it also is looking at the interface between humans and machines, and whether or not machines can help people in ways that go beyond what they have done. Is machine learning and datamining to try and give people better mental health treatment ethical? Can these companies truly be trusted with the data? Are the ambitious people at the head of the company visionaries, or ruthless sociopaths?
I was enjoying it… but then, the story got to its end, and it rather flubbed the landing.
The story as a whole examines the flaws in the Eliza system, as well as Evelyn’s own relationship with it and the other people who worked on the project, as well as people who are still working on it. At the end, the player is finally presented with choices that determine the ending of the work.
And yet… I found it to be quite unsatisfying in the end.
The game felt pretty solid leading up to the last couple chapters, but while finally being able to go off Eliza’s script in chapter 6 felt like it was going to be a cathartic moment, it didn’t really end up feeling as climactic as the story felt like it was going to be. There were things I wanted to say to the patients, but those weren’t actual options I was presented with in a lot of cases; Evelyn was still limited, and while having two choices instead of one was something, it didn’t end up giving the sense of freedom that I think it was intending for. To be fair, some of it was also, I think, deliberate; some of Eliza’s suggestions actually were helpful to people, and it was clear that Eliza was ultimately helpful in some ways. The story isn’t supposed to be “Eliza bad”, it’s that the whole thing was complicated, and people had unrealistic expectations for what it could do but it could help some people sometimes.
And the endings were a very mixed bag. Three of the endings felt like they completely discarded the grayness and moral ambiguity of the story, instead feeling very “all or nothing, black or white”, instead of embracing the many shades of gray that the story had deliberately been painting with up to that point. Of the five endings, only one felt like it was really a “proper” way to end the story, and a second feeling at least "reasonable" in a sense, but really turning the whole thing into something of a shaggy dog story.
The result is that the story didn’t ultimately stick the landing, and if you don’t stick the landing, your story doesn’t really work. The story had interesting ideas, but it ultimately fails to go to interesting places with them.
And that’s a pity.
I’m glad Zachtronics tried something different, and many of the things in the story were things that I myself had thought about, and thus, I found it interesting to see others thinking along the same lines, but it ultimately didn’t feel like it delivered.… Expand
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