Pulsatrix Games’ last title, Fobia, was a pretty solid survival horror game that simply didn’t have the enemy variety to sustain its length. When I saw that they had a new game coming out, I wondered if this was something they’d rectify, as I assumed it would be in a similar vein. The dev technically did improve enemy variety from a certain standpoint, but in reality, they didn’t really. While AILA is a lot like Fobia, it’s also very different, with a much more linear, focused campaign and some pretty impressive design, alongside an interesting structure, even if I wasn’t happy with the ending I received.
AILA focuses on Samuel, a beta tester who receives a new VR game setup in the mail to test. It has a simple conceit; the system is run by an AI named AILA that tailors game sessions to players via procedural generation (which feels pretty relevant considering how constantly AI is intruding in our lives nowadays.) These are called “experiences” and typically last an hour or two (with shorter ones book-ending the game at the beginning and end). We control Samuel in his apartment and have him put his VR headset on to see the next experience, for the most part. There’s more to it, but revealing it would put a damper on the game. Overall, the game’s plot is actually very familiar, as I’ve played another survival horror game that had the same basic premise.
All of the experiences in AILA are of the horror variety, which makes sense considering this is a horror game, but also not really, because if you were having an AI tailor games to your preferences, it’d probably be a pretty major failure if it only offered one genre. At the outset, it appears that there’s going to be a fair amount of variety on display in terms of the experiences offered. The first main experience is akin to P.T., Hideo Kojima’s teaser for Silent Hills, where you wander a looping hallway (albeit with a mechanic that has you change the channels on TVs to move to different layers.) The next is a more typical survival-horror exercise in a spooky farmhouse against alien-looking baby monsters.
After that, you find yourself in a medieval village, fighting zombies with melee weapons and crossbows. But subsequent experiences make it clear that everything here neatly fits into typical survivor horror trappings consistent with Fobia. They all have different settings, but the gameplay, rules, and UI are all basically the same. You’ll explore linear areas, fight enemies with melee weapons and guns, grab items to use to open the way forward, and solve puzzles. As such, their differences are surface level. For instance, you’ll always heal by drinking a certain kind of beverage that can be combined with a plant for a full heal.
As such, AILA is very much a familiar survival horror experience that’s broken into chapters, basically. Instead of Fobia, which offered a single interconnected environment, you’ll leave each area at an experience’s end and be unable to return. Due to this, any supplies you’ve found will reset each time you finish up, so there’s no reason to hoard anything, which is very different from most other games of this ilk. Because of this, you’ll almost always be flush with supplies, which really weakens the whole survival aspect. Weirdly, restarting from a checkpoint will heal you, which is a pretty questionable choice for a game like this.
This means that you don’t typically need to heal and waste an item at all, as dying and trying again with full health means that you’ll always have healing items when you need them. That being said, AILA can be somewhat challenging, especially since the combat’s a bit sluggish and enemies can seemingly come out of nowhere. As for the enemy variety, this game, as I mentioned before, is both better and worse than Fobia was in that regard. For the better, each experience has different enemies, depending on the situation. There are baby monsters, zombies, wraiths, tree monsters, and more. However, almost all of them are functionally similar.
All the default enemies tend to swipe at you or grab, requiring you to shake them off or kill them outright if you have a knife in your inventory. Despite the above, it works, and they feel different enough that I didn’t mind this. Depending on the era, you have access to different melee weapons. Modern eras might give you a machete, while others have swords. A pistol, shotgun, and rifle show up in modern experiences, while a crossbow and powder-loaded pistol can be found elsewhere. Much like the enemies, they’re all similar, but with some tweaks.
The adventure game facets are quite engaging in AILA as well, with some clever stuff here and there. Yes, you’ll mostly be using an item on an object, but there are some (fairly simple) reasoning puzzles and a few parts that might make you scratch your head. One experience in particular was kind of confusing in this way, but it was an outlier. Most experiences are a mix of adventuring and combat, with some leaning more on one than the other. The result is a fairly polished, above-board survival horror game that brings to life some clever ideas here and there that I won’t spoil.
At certain points, AILA asks you to make a decision that affects what endings you can get. However, you’re not given enough context to know what these mean until later on, so it’s very easy to get locked into terrible endings. The game ended on a binary choice for me, with each choice leading to depressing endings that did nothing to really wrap up the story. While I do like this game, I don’t see myself going through it again anytime soon to right my wrongs. I think it’s a bit unfair for the game to force you to make such major decisions despite it withholding information, but it is what it is.
I was thoroughly entertained by AILA and think Pulsatrix did a fine job here, even if their previous game did some things better. I also must add that the English dub voice acting for the main character is horribly miscast, while the original Portuguese-speaking actor absolutely nails it. The voice actor portraying AILA, the AI herself in English, does an excellent job, though. All-in-all, the eight hours it took to see it through to the end were well worth it, even though I’m going to just look up the other endings on YouTube.
AILA: AILA is a highly linear experience that doesn't do much to try and forge new pathways, but it's an efficiently made, somewhat spooky trip through multiple settings. – Andrew Farrell
Check out our previous review
