Selfie: Sisters of the Amniotic Lens

Let me be straight with you: Selfie: Sisters of the Amniotic Lens does not have a skill tree, a resource economy, or a build order. It does not have AI in any meaningful strategic sense. Rail Slave Games developer Dylan Barry has openly said it is "not really a game as such," and after spending time with it, he is correct. What it is instead is harder to categorize: part confessional booth, part psychological horror vignette, part lo-fi social network, with a veneer of two very thin minigames holding the whole structure upright. The setting is 198X, saturated in teletext aesthetics and no-wave ambient audio. You wake up in a decaying room next to a mutilated corpse, surrounded by flies. The cult-lore setup, delivered via FMV pirate news broadcasts, concerns the Sisters of the Amniotic Lens, a group who believed they could open dimensional gateways through ritual self-harm. Six are dead. The seventh is unaccounted for. The two interaction loops are, by design, barebones. First: you use a lens object on your desk to scan flies moving around the room. Hit enough of them and the CRT television activates, letting you cycle channels until you locate a camera feed of the room itself. That click opens the second loop: a wireframe space populated by floating bottles. Each bottle contains the personal message a real player typed into the game's profile screen at launch, where the game asks you to write something raw, something you would not normally say out loud. Shoot a bottle, then choose to "condemn" or "free" that player, adjusting their in-game score. There is a technical ending, though getting there is secondary to the loop of reading other people's submissions. The quality of those messages ranges from genuinely affecting to complete noise, because no moderation exists. That is arguably the point. From a systems perspective, there is almost nothing here. Session length before you have seen everything is measured in low single-digit hours at most, and reports from the Steam community suggest the server-side loading screens for the space segment have been broken for years, with players hitting infinite loads before reaching the message bottles at all. That is a serious functional problem for what is meant to be a live social layer. The fly AI is technically the most complex moving part of the entire build, which tells you something about the design priorities. Repeat play value is effectively zero unless you find the message-reading loop compelling on its own terms. Who is this for, then? Honestly, a very specific overlap: players who collect curio-tier experimental titles, people drawn to David Lynch-adjacent mood pieces, or anyone curious about games as confessional social spaces rather than competitive systems. Reviewers at the time were split between seeing it as a genuinely novel emotional object and writing it off as hollow posturing. Both reads have merit. The 1980s-inspired wireframe visuals and unsettling ambient soundtrack do create atmosphere efficiently, and the central idea of strangers judging each other's anonymous confessions is more interesting as a concept than the execution sustains. But the mechanical depth is essentially nil, the online components appear unreliable at this stage of the title's life, and there is no modding ecosystem, no community tooling, nothing that rewards the analytical layer I usually bring to a review. If you approach it as a ten-minute art installation with an optional confessional attached, your expectations will be correctly calibrated. If you approach it as a game, the numbers will not add up.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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