This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.
Sorry, James came out at the perfect time for me. I had just finished Doki Doki Literature Club and was in the mood for more psychological horror, breaking-the-fourth-wall type of games. This one definitely fits the bill, tasking you (a tech worker at weapons giant Mantis) with covertly decrypting a collection of files and responding to IM messages from your boss and colleague. It also interacts with the real world in some surprising ways, adding to the feeling that you are searching for clues anywhere you can find them.
The primary “game” at the center of Sorry, James is a fairly simple number-based logic puzzle. Each base panel must be connected to the given number of same-colored squares, and your task is to figure out how to lay those squares out so that each base panel gets its requisite number of connections. There are a few modifiers added throughout the game to make it more challenging, but once you get a handle on what the modifier does, none of the puzzles require more than a few minutes of clicking around to figure out.
The real story lives in the files you solve puzzles to decrypt – they contain bits of a text conversation between a woman named Elisa and someone else (their parts are corrupted or still encrypted). The conversation bits are not unlocked in chronological order and details are sparse so it’s a bit difficult to tell what is going on, but it becomes clear that the two people begin chatting by accident and develop a relationship over time. The mystery second person talks about a woman he used to know, who turns out to be an AI he worked to create. I have a wholly undeveloped fan theory that at least one of the two people in the chat is also an AI, but like I mentioned earlier, details that would confirm this theory are sparse in the game.
It took me a few hours to finish Sorry, James and I did spend a couple more hours trying to figure out one last (optional) mystery. It is not a long game but is very inexpensive, and satisfying even to just solve the logic puzzles without worrying about the larger story. I recommend picking it up.… Expand
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