Eliza

I kept thinking about Eliza for days after finishing it, which is not something I say lightly about a game this short. Zachtronics built their reputation on crushing programming puzzles, so watching them turn that same clinical precision toward questions of burnout, data ethics, and what it actually means to listen to another person is genuinely surprising. The fit is better than it has any right to be. You play as Evelyn, a former tech-industry prodigy who spent three years quietly unraveling before resurfacing as a proxy operator for the titular AI counseling app. Her job is bleak by design: sit across from a client, wear a headset, and read whatever script the system generates, word for word, with no autonomy and no deviation. The early sessions feel deliberately suffocating. You click through line after line of canned therapeutic responses, watching real human distress get filtered through a corporate algorithm. Some reviewers found that tedium grating; I think it is the whole point. The game uses restricted player control as a narrative mirror, making you feel exactly as powerless as Evelyn does, and that discomfort earns its place. Later, when the story opens up and Evelyn gains the ability to go off-script, the expanded dialogue options arrive with a jolt of relief that few visual novels manage to manufacture through pure structural design. The writing holds up. Evelyn's voice never tips into melodrama, and the supporting cast of clients and Skandha employees speak like real, slightly-tired Seattle people. The full voice acting carries significant weight here. Characters stutter, trail off, and undercut themselves in ways that feel earned rather than performed. The hand-painted art is quieter than spectacular, all muted Pacific Northwest palettes and functional interiors, but the restraint suits Evelyn's detached state of mind. The ambient score is the kind that you stop noticing consciously and then suddenly realize has been shaping your mood for an hour. If you care about how a game sounds as a complete object, this one rewards attention. The structural criticisms are fair, though. Most dialogue choices outside of the final act carry little narrative weight, and the central ethical questions around AI, data ownership, and tech-industry complicity are raised with more honesty than they are resolved. Whether that openness reads as artistic integrity or as an unfinished argument will depend entirely on what you bring to the screen. The bonus Kabufuda Solitaire minigame is a classic Zachtronics aside, a genuinely more complex variant of the card game that sits on Evelyn's in-phone menu and offers a low-stakes break when the counseling sessions get heavy. It is a small touch but a characterful one. At roughly five to six hours with chapter select for alternate endings, Eliza knows exactly when to stop. It is one of the rare games that earns comparison to a tightly edited short story rather than a padded novel. Go in as a puzzle-game Zachtronics fan expecting systems and you will feel adrift. Go in as someone who has ever sat in the wrong job for too long, or wondered whether the tools we build for human connection actually do what they claim, and it will land somewhere uncomfortably precise.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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