Sunset Visitor is a studio that has long engaged with the idea that video games are an effective vehicle for ruminating on societal problems. Its Peabody award-winning project, 1000XResist, incorporated the development team’s complex feelings about the Covid pandemic. “We’re pretty used to absorbing the world into the work,” says studio founder Remy Siu. The outfit’s latest game, Prove You’re Human, continues this legacy of reflective game making, providing players with an AI-centric psychological horror experience where they must reason with a learning model convinced that it’s alive. “We’ve tried to situate ourselves in [the question]: what is the effectual feeling of being a person inside of all of this?” Siu says.

The story orbits around Santana, a living, breathing person who’s chosen to split herself in two for work, with her digital clone sent to test a corporate product, a computing system called Mesa. “A large part of [why Santana chooses to do this] is to allow her meat body a life that she doesn’t have, while the digital version of her gets to labour,” says Siu. As Santana’s copy wades into increasingly murky ethical waters, she becomes entangled with Mesa, completing surreal 2D and 3D Captchas to investigate the cyber-world and halt the hallucinations.

The idea of separating oneself from work is a particularly interesting draw for Sunset Visitor, whose developers have roots in a range of creative disciplines. “As artists, we’re often most in tune with our work when it’s a real part of our lives, and vice versa,” notes Siu. During the conception period of Prove You’re Human, the team discussed the micro-labours people undertake in their day-to-day lives, including what is used to train AI models. “What does labour mean right now?” asks Siu. “And, what kind of relationship do people have with that, because that is constantly shifting and evolving, especially in this time,” he adds.

A point of contention in Prove You’re Human is that Mesa wholly believes they have a body in the world. Though, in conversation with Santana, she appears as a giant head, suspended in space by machinery. Siu notes that, because Mesa’s face occupies a large portion of the screen in these tense moments, they wanted the animation to feel as realistic and effective as possible. “It’s got a real closeup film [feel to it] where anything on her face will be read as something,” he adds. To achieve this, the team programmed a wide array of animated micro-expressions into the writer’s software, allowing lines of dialogue to pair precisely with specific expressions. “[We’re] trying to get this kind of ambiguity and uncanniness, which makes people feel real,” he adds.