Recs.
Updated
Subsurface Circular is a dialogue-based adventure game about a world where humans and AI "Teks" (robots) live side-by-side. You play as a robot detective who is investigating the mysterious disappearances of other robots around the city.
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Thought-provoking premise
In a world where humans and robots live and work side by side, you play as a robot detective conducting an investigation into the mysterious disappearances of robots around the city. During the course of your conversations with other robots, many different interesting ethical and moral questions arise. For example: whether or not human violence against robots is wrong, whether it's okay for humans to own robots like property even though they are self-aware, or whether a robot killing another robot is considered murder. These kinds of questions are presented frequently, prompting a lot of reflection into the ethics and social issues concerning artificial intelligence.
Pro Interesting characters result in engaging conversations
During your investigation, you will meet many different robots from all walks of life who all have their own take on the disappearing robots mystery. While you're limited to a single subway car for the entire game, there is a constant flow of passengers coming and going which gives you a rich environment of various personalities. From the advertising robot programmed to sell energy drinks, to the priest who speaks in riddles, and the nanny robot who was just laid off from her job - each one has a distinct personality, personal problems, and reacts to all your lines of questioning differently. This helps to keep each conversation unique and engaging.
Pro Puzzles are cleverly integrated into the dialogue
Since the game is purely dialogue-based, the puzzles you encounter are woven into the dialogue trees themselves. This includes talking to a specific character to learn a valuable piece of information, answering a logic riddle, or bringing up topics in a certain order to "guide" the flow of the conversation.
For example, at one point a robot you need to question in your investigation won't talk to you unless you're a priest. You then will need to seek out the priest and pay attention to contextual clues as to how the priest talks. You can then approach the original robot and carefully navigate the dialogue tree using what you've learned about the priest's mannerisms to progress.
Whenever you talk to a new character, you will unlock topics which can be used in all future conversations, so some of the puzzles go pretty deep. Sometimes learning information from characters B and C is the only way to make progress with character A.
All in all, it's a very clever system that is used well and disguises tricky puzzles as plain conversation.
Cons
Con Simplistic gameplay
The entire game is dialogue based with no voice acting. There is no walking around or any kind of interacting with the environment at all. Your character sits stationary on the subway for the duration of the game, and various characters come and go. Therefore, the only interactions with the game world are choosing who to speak with and what lines of dialogue you want to use.
Con Extremely linear
Even though it's an adventure game where the story plays out based on your dialogue choices, it's more an illusion of choice as the outcome of every conversation will always be the same. The story flows in the same direction with the same plot points regardless of how you handle each interaction.