They took him! They took the butt ugly bloke who was squatting in the bathroom! The one who kept insisting that the sun’s burning heat was cleansing the Earth of sin and, totally unconnected from that I assume, was divorced. Those hazmat-suited fiends! I ought to give them a piece of my mind.
I bloody well will do, just as soon as I’ve worked out who’s turned two of my other guests into neatly arranged bin bags of dead parts. My suspicions are firmly lodged at the feet of the toothless and fish-faced nun who ended up the only one in that room left alive, and my trigger finger’s itchy.
These are thoughts that may end up going through your mind as you play No, I’m Not a Human, a paranoia-fuelled horror game that developers Trioskaz released into the world yesterday, September 15th. I’ve finally got around to firing up the trusty RPS press account today and giving its first hour or so a go. Thus far, it’s got me thouroughly freaked, when I’m not roaring with laughter at just how wacky some of its characters have purposefully been made to look.
If you want an idea of what I mean, check out the collage of images further down. In the meantime, to set the scene, here’s the synopsis offered by the game’s Steam page:
Sunrise. Twilight of Earth. The world is ending. Acrid auromas of sun-scorched streets fill the air. Blackened corpses gnarled into shapes of agony line streets. Peering outside is enough to scorch eyes from the socket. The only refuge is in the night. But the night belongs to the Visitors. A knock on the door. A solitary voice, begging for refuge. They look like us. Talk like us. Smell like us. Are they us? Look for the signs.
As you can tell, it’s very much sunshine and rainbows stuff. You’re a faceless person living alone, in a house with the sort of perfectly eerie atmos you can only achieve by having someone’s grandparents consult on your decor. The sun is doing a thing, so everyone’s been forced to become nocturnal and remain indoors. That’s where the Visitors come in. They’re Lovecraftian creatures said to emerged from underground, equipped with the ability to almost perfectly mirror being human and an insatiable desire to sit on your sofa.
Image credit: Critical Reflex
You probably shouldn’t do what I did: let everyone in regardless of how much they look like creepy deformed putty. That is, unless you want to wake up to a notification iniforming you that it smells like someone died last night. In an effort to try and stop that from happening, you’ve got to use up your limited energy during the day to check the guests you’ve let in for apparent signs of being a Visitor you hear via the TV or radio. Stuff like having perfectly white teeth, bloodshot eyes, or muck under their fingernails. As you can imagine, the game has fun with all of these would-be symptoms of visitordom being things any regular person might have.
So far, I’ve managed to successfully identify and blow the head off of one Visitor, as well as ruthlessly execute a couple of people who must, in hindsight, have just been regular weirdos. There’s a wonderfully foreboding anticipation to waking up each night and hearing the knock that signals the start of a parade of new guests to consider letting in, though it might be better if their arrivals were a bit more spaced out, rather than one person rocking up the moment another leaves. The sense of isolation as the game gradually feeds you scraps of info from the outside world is quite absorbing too.
I also wish No, I’m Not a Human would let me save more freely. You can do so by downing bottles of khombucha, but you only get one to start off with, meaning that if you drink that early, you can easily lose a bunch of progress. I need that progress, Trioskaz. I need to see if the hazmat fiends will return my unsightly loo-dwelling sun-worshipper.
No, I’m Not a Human is out now on Steam, priced at discounted £11.51/$13.49/€13.31 until September 29th.
