Isolation

Isolation is a short psychological horror game created by pianotm for the 2016 Halloween event here on RMN. It is largely limited to a single room, which allows it to explore the titular theme effectively. It feels rather fresh for rmk horror, even if its inspirations in the grander sci-fi media are quite apparent.

Gameplay

The game is another heavily narrative experience. You walk around, interact with things to read their description in a given order to advance the plot, and make dialogue choices every once in a while. While not a Visual Novel per se, you can see how this descriptor fits the game’s spirit.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)



Isolation has a cool background of Mars as its menu image, well-complemented by an ominous sci-fi theme that’s apparently self-composed. Music in the opening is really cool as well, and the ending uses late Bowie’s Life on Mars. However, game is largely silent afterwards, with no background audio. Perhaps piano assumed it would make moments where music does play more effective, but even so, it should have at least had (fitting) footstep sounds, and/or interaction sounds besides the default menu ones to compensate. The graphics are all custom, though, and while event-imposed time restrictions obviously resulted in some parts looking rougher than others and/or unfinished, you do get used to it soon enough, allowing the good parts to stand out. Facesets (faceset, really) is a particular highlight: the protagonist seems to have around 10 different portraits, all for a game that can be beaten in about as many minutes.

Storyline

You take on the role of Gia Leung, “the first woman on Mars” and currently its only human, since the game begins with an overpressure-caused explosion killing her companion, Dr. Piotr Gransky, and leaving her and the assistant AI, MISY, alone and waiting for the NASA shuttle to pick her up in about 6 weeks. According to the intro text, this is happening sometime in the 2020’s as controller AIs like MISY were fully employed by NASA in 2021. In this case, I suppose it’s a vision of a more optimistic future then ours: current status of both US race relations and international relations does not exactly foresee either an Asian-American or a Russian being the first to be sent to Mars by NASA, let alone both at once. (Unless it was a joint CNSA/Roskosmos expedition and NASA is only rescuing them, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.)

Either way, the only thing NASA crew back home says directly to Gia is an instruction to bag away the fresh corpse in the small tunnel where he died, all to prevent him from polluting the air in your tiny, tightly enclosed place. This kind of down-to-earth (Mars?) utilitarianism is refreshing in RMN sci-fi, and defines the writing. Most of what you do is similar routine, small actions that collectively ensure your survival. Check the drinking water supply; check the bathing facilities; check the packaged food supply; check the experiments at plant growth; check the air filtration system and whether or not its filters need changing. You may do these actions in any order, with the week officially ending when all of them are done. I saw something similar earlier in (now-removed) Cavia porcellus: however, that game was both crippled by a far worse premise and didn’t understand a crucial rule of narrative contrast: routine repetition works in a narrative when it makes moments that are unique stand out so much brighter. On its own, the mere gradual deterioration (present in both games) is not enough, since that’s something a player pretty much expects from the get-go already.



Isolation understands that, and so once you check all these systems (or at least, ones that are still working) in 30 seconds or so, there’ll be a story snippet, mainly in the form of conversation with MISY, and more often than not, it’ll involve a choice as well. The most important one is to do with the heart monitor, and whether you trust MISY enough to put it on: the effects of either decision will soon be apparent. Halfway through the game, there’s a cool instance where you play “guess the word” with MISY, based on syllables alone. However, the most effective choice happens immediately after, and involves the music box. Choosing no at my second try after first choosing yes like you should have had is really disturbing in spite of the underlying simplicity. The latter half of the game unfortunately lacks these moments of choice, but replaces them with largely effective psychological horror instead, leading up to the ending that generally achieves what it should.

I did say "an ending", because Isolation is ultimately a game you should only play through once. Its choices feel like they matter when they are presented to you, but subsequent plays will show that’s not really the case. Even the heart monitor choice ultimately only affects the ending by a single line. Music box is irrelevant to the ultimate outcome and I doubt if performance at word-guessing affects anything either: I thought scoring high there would provide greater sanity, but apparently this wasn’t the case. Playing through it again, you might also wonder more about the aspects its narrative didn’t touch upon (i.e. why did the ground control delegate everything to MISY and failed to intervene in any way later on?!), and notice the bugs.

The initial contest download suffers from being outright unbeatable, so make sure you do not choose that one. The updated one still has a few notable irregularities in spite of being as short as it is. The aforementioned word-guessing game is the most broken one: “No thank you” still results in it proceeding the same as if you chose yes. Then, the “ESS” set of answers comes up twice, even though the second question syllable is “SIT”, while at the end, you’ll receive “Regrettably, you didn’t get a single one” message regardless of how well you actually fared, before your real performance comes up. If you enter the tunnels with Gransky’s body on week 2, you’ll automatically transition to week 3 as you go back up (afterwards, going down there is impossible.) Lastly, some typos and passabilities.



Conclusion

Regardless of my various gripes, I still liked my experience playing Isolation, even if I wanted it to be longer and better. I would say it’s certainly worth a short playthrough, especially once pianotm cleans up the odd bugs and typos I listed above.