On September 15th, development studio Trioskaz released a new game, No, I’m not a Human. While it may not have been extremely noticeable among the high-profile September releases, it’s worth checking out for fans of horror games, as Trioskaz has created an interesting concept, its own distinctive style, and a great atmosphere.
No, I’m not a Human is an engaging psychological horror game, a symbiosis of a visual novel and a social strategy game in the vein of Paper, Please—characters appear at different times at night and can be either real people or the mimic Visitors.
A global catastrophe has occurred in the local world—solar flares have rendered daylight deadly, and now people can only leave their homes at night. But the saving moonlight brought with it a new threat: strangers from the underworld, masterfully mimicking real people. Hiding under human guise, they infiltrate homes and kill those who prove too trusting or lonely.
In the game, you are the owner of a house where people (or are they people, really?) knock on the door every night seeking shelter. Your task is to decide which of them are human and which are monsters. Of course, you can refuse to accept any guests, but there’s a catch: you won’t last long alone, either, as a creature prowls nearby that preys on those who are alone. You have to take a risk and let strangers in.
However, don’t despair just yet—the government has developed a whole guide on how to distinguish “Visitors” from humans: check their eye color, the cleanliness of their teeth, dirt under their nails, etc. Every day, new information emerges about what the aliens (?) look like, but each check drains your energy, which is very limited.
If there are three guests in the house, and you only have enough energy to check two, you’ll have to trust your intuition. A mistake could cost someone their life.
Although sometimes you can spot a Visitor by their behavior. A person wraps themselves in a jacket, complaining about the cold in 30-degree heat? Suspicious. A girl doesn’t remember her past? Maybe she’s a Visitor. Or maybe she’s just crazy—there are plenty of those here.
Over time, the game introduces new variables: Quarantine service officers arrive, cultists make threats, fortune-tellers, and even one special Visitor who doesn’t even think about disguising himself as a human. You must constantly make difficult decisions and inevitably make mistakes.
The game randomly shuffles characters and events, so every new playthrough is unique. And with a dozen different endings, you’ll be motivated to return to the game again and again, just to test the waters.
What if… If you let the girl and her cat in? If you’re left alone? If you have a Visitor as your roommate? Or maybe if you listen to the Cultists or not… And you’ll return again and again to the game, thirsting to find out what will happen.
The developers have succeeded in creating an incredibly unsettling and paranoid world. A gloomy house, creepy scenes outside the window, strange and grotesque characters—all this contributes to an atmosphere of hopelessness.
The visuals—a post-Soviet retro city, a gloomy house, and deliberately strange cutscenes and animations—will reveal this amazing game to you; the further you play, the stranger the game’s visuals become. At the start, you’ll be greeted by an advertisement for perfect teeth, and then you’ll check your roommates for those same perfect teeth, as this is one of the hallmarks of Visitors. Blood-red eyes, crooked teeth, ulcers and other visual abominations will greet you more than once in the game.
The overall visuals greatly influence the atmosphere. Incidentally, we experience an all-consuming, destructive feeling of emptiness throughout the game: in living chaos, people constantly go mad, and our hero can only meekly watch the world slide into the abyss, drowning in not the most pleasant thoughts. The phrase “Earthly life is a vale of tears” is perfect here—often, the game offers the only possible escape—death. That’s how hard and hopeless it is.
The gameplay can be easily mastered in a couple of minutes, but making decisions requires constant brain strain – what if you let a Visitor into the house and a bag of human remains appears in your kitchen?
But in this darkness, there’s room for cozy little things: you can listen to the radio, order a can of invigorating energy drink, hang out in front of the TV with news about self-isolation and the fear of the sun scorching the Earth, or drag your cat around the house (I don’t think I’ve ever felt so touched by a game). And at night, when the sun has set, you can gaze out the windows… It’s safe now, right?
Returning to the devastation, the visuals and sound also work fantastically to enhance it. The unusual character proportions, with their combination of grotesque and photorealistic elements, evoke a sense of unease and the uncanny valley. And the twilight palette of the environments tricks our perceptions in every way, introducing more and more nasty moments into the gameplay.
But the music… Simultaneously beautiful and oppressive: as the game progresses, struggling to balance between peace and anxiety, it increasingly drags you into a depressing state. This is far from a classic horror soundtrack—it’s frightening solely with its hopelessness and profound sadness (because of it, at one of the endings, I wanted to radically reconsider my views on life—a nightmare, in a word).
On the one hand, the game’s atmosphere is off the charts, and its replayability allows you to replay it again and again. On the other, the story-driven gameplay is a bit short; I would have liked a lot more of a plot.
