Backlog Bingo 2025: Who's Lila

(This is probably going to spoil at least a little bit of a game most people think should be played blind, so here's that warning.)

Who's Lila is one of those games that doesn't quite escalate to the level of "my partners call it important to them", but two people I'm dating did say that they really liked this. (Proxy streamed it a while ago, and really enjoyed it; Lexi played it on the back of the Jacob Geller video about it and really enjoyed it.) I ended up putting it on my card fairly blind: I intentionally skipped the Jacob Geller video myself after hearing that it'd be best to stay uninformed on, and I hadn't watched Proxy stream much of it anyway.

As Fén would say: I think that I do not know how to eat this.

I'll get this out of the way first: Who's Lila is interesting. Its primary mechanic is unlike anything I've seen elsewhere, it's sprawling Lynchian story of the sort that I typically really enjoy, it is genuinely unmooring in its non-linearity, and I respect it a lot as a game that just hard-commits to every weird thing it wants to do. A neural network that runs a mechanic? Secret DLC that's required for a quarter of the game's endings? A real-world Twitter account for one of the game's characters that gives in-character information? Yeah, all that's here. It's ambitious. Much credit where credit is due. (Also I think it's funny that I started it at a time that it would give me my second occurrence of the word "tulpa" in a day. When you know so many plural people I guess you end up experiencing multiplicity Baader–Meinhof. (Yes, I went out of my way to write "multiplicity Baader–Meinhof", fight me.))

So, it's not that Who's Lila is bad. It's just kinda tailor-made to frustrate me? It's difficult to even explain why I had such a hard time with it, but I think it mostly condenses to a few things that I'll unpack after:

• I really don't have patience for "the way to progress feels is trial and error", especially when the mechanical ways to do that trying are as opaque as they are in this game
• I similarly don't have patience for "ending X is the same path as ending Y but then you make this other choice instead" when hitting both requires replaying most of a game
• the actual main mechanic primarily just leaves me with the feeling that I'm trapped in Spooky Autistic Hellscape World™ instead of playing a video game, and this is true in a way that feels...invalidating? more than horrifying?

Yeah okay it turns out there's a lot to unpack in those three bullets huh.

So, Who's Lila, narratively, is not dissimilar to a visual novel: there are a ton of endings (eighteen, though only fifteen "normal" ones), how to get them is opaque to the player, but you'll stumble your way through a first playthrough making whatever choices feel right and end up on "a route" that gets you to an ending. My problem is that interacting with this requires me to interact with the game's primary mechanic: you do not have dialogue choices as in a typical VN or adventure game, but instead, all of your character's possible responses come in the form of "draw the emotional tone of their response on their face and a neural network will interpret what face you've drawn". (This is tutorialized by the protagonist's bathroom mirror and a series of conversations with himself: "if someone said this to me, I'd be shocked!" (draw a surprised face) type things) I found this to be basically impossible to interact with when combined with bullet one: even if I know "I should express anger here", I couldn't reliably draw the emotions other than "neutral" and "smile" (turn the ends of the mouth up) and "sad" (turn the corners of the mouth down). By the time I'd parsed that, for example, the game will easily resolve "raise an eyebrow and don't touch the mouth at all" to surprise, but that the same thing with an open D: mouth will more likely resolve to disgust, I was mostly done with the game, and at no point did I ever feel like I could actually reliably get responses I wanted. (Also, the game makes itself more difficult by having the protagonist's face contort itself in ways you don't want, and you have to fight this to draw the right faces at times.)

This would be fine, I think, if the game were fairly narratively straightforward, but it is not at all: as mentioned, there are fifteen endings to get. Some are easy: there's a giant monster, the game says "CLOSE YOUR EYES", if you close your eyes you don't die and you get the Wheel of Fortune ending (they're all named after major arcana tarot cards), if you don't close your eyes you get Death. Easy to understand! Then there's...this, from a walkthrough:

After, talk to the police officers. Make the following expressions: Neutral Happy Happy Neutral Neutral Neutral Surprised Scared Angry Sad. Now, Detective Fisher will come in to talk to you. Make the following expressions: Neutral Neutral Angry Neutral Surprise Neutral Surprise Angry. With that, you've reached one of the 15 endings.

Or perhaps you'd like Justice instead of Judgment? Easy:

After, talk to the police officers. Make the following expressions: Neutral Happy Happy Neutral Neutral Neutral Surprised Scared Angry Sad. Now, Detective Fisher will come question you a bit more: Angry Angry Angry Angry Scared Neutral Angry Angry. With that, you've reached one of the 15 endings.

I cannot express how little I enjoyed the combination of that level of mechanical fiddliness and narrative specificity. And: I'm going to be thinking about this one for a long time. It's trying to do so much. This leaves it at the weirdest possible Doll Scale 2/5: I won't recommend it to people because I think it's a pain in the ass, and I definitely think it wasted my time, and it gets the "left me thinking" and "arbitrary point" points.