In Silicon Dreams, you play the role of an corporate-owned android tasked with interrogating the functionality and compliance of other androids and humans in this universe. To start, the game places you in an office "with a view," where you sit a desk from which you will remotely perform interrogations of your poor subjects. Throughout your interrogations, you will ask subjects questions about work, family, personal life, and pointed questions, and you will uncover truths, half-truths, and direct lies all while measuring emotional responses. Upon completion of your interview, you will complete a report to your superiors and essentially act in the capacity of "judge, jury, and executioner" toward your subject, as you have the ability to release them, repair (reformat and wipe) them, or decomission (kill).

After each interrogation, you are back to your apartment, which can vary based on your standing with the company that owns you. This is a nice mechanic because it implies that quality work and compliance to the corporation is rewarded. Due to my obedience (and cold-bloodedness) I was rewarded with a special tool for use during interrogation that allowed me to induce certain emotional responses from the subjects (more on this later). While in your apartment, you can only do three things: Review the after-interrogation report, watch the news (see a photo and one-line headline) and hibernate (sleep and go to the next interrogation). Your decisions during the interrogation will affect the story outcome in the sense that you will get some email response, often from the subjects themselves. Emails usually express appreciation for leniency, or espouse threats/guilt-trip you for having reformatted or decommissioned an "innocent" android.

My biggest peeve with this game is that it did not provide me with a sense of moral ambiguity that goes in hand with cyberpunk literature. The biggest tell to this is the fact that you role-play as an android yourself, yet it is impossible to empathize (or in the case of your interview subjects, sympathize?) with the kinds of emotions, if any, an android is supposed to be feeling. The experience is not synonymous and the game forces the user to leap to this conclusion which is a disingenuous answer to the entire moral dilemma presented in previous writings. The game might make more sense if you were interviewing from the perspective from a human interrogator, or even better, if it is ambiguous, akin to Rick Deckard. I think the medium of a story based game from the first person perspective of an android doesn't translate well. There is sometimes a sense of powerlessness in the result of some interrogations, lending to the thought that "no matter what I say during the interrogation, I cannot control the outcome," and I am still unsure whether this was the developers' intention or if it is just weak game design.

In terms of graphics, over 90% of this game's experience has its basis in the text alone. The writing is generally good, however its presentation is slightly unpolished. The world around the story's presentation is meant to provide immersion, and you will need to rely upon your imagination to at least some degree in order to fill in the gaps. There are a limited number of scenes that are visually represented in the game. If you can accept that this is a text-driven game, it shouldn't be a problem. Also, this is nit-picky, but I think a different font face for the holographic user interface would be better suited to the cyberpunk setting. Or, consider offering some options to the user. Overall though, I get that this is a story-based game and did not mind the graphical augmentations designed to help color the world.

The game is short, and I completed it in about 5 hours. This is simply matter of fact, and not to its detriment in any way. I would have liked for the option of manual saves, but it is not offered. You must play through the entire game again to see different story paths. My impression is that the game was designed with a singular "good end" in mind. However I also believe that there are multiple endings that can be achieved. It might take some grinding through repeat dialogue to find all of them, and while I enjoyed my experience the first time through, the dialog is not so good that I would not mind reading through it all once again.

Disclosure: I have completed a single play-through of this game and do not plan to continue playing it. After playing through the game, I was surprised by the lack of a "negative perspective" review on Steam, so I decided to provide one. I hope that the developers are not dissuaded by this feedback and continue developing games like this one, and believe that a sequel which expands upon the original, which incorporating this feedback would actually be an amazing contribution to the Steam store.

In Silicon Dreams, you play the role of an corporate-owned android tasked with interrogating the functionality and compliance of other androids and humans in this universe. To start, the game places you in an office "with a view," where you sit a desk from which you will remotely perform interrogations of your poor subjects. Throughout your interrogations, you will ask subjects questions about work, family, personal life, and pointed questions, and you will uncover truths, half-truths, and direct lies all while measuring emotional responses. Upon completion of your interview, you will complete a report to your superiors and essentially act in the capacity of "judge, jury, and executioner" toward your subject, as you have the ability to release them, repair (reformat and wipe) them, or decomission (kill). After each interrogation, you are back to your apartment, which can vary based on your standing with the company that owns you. This is a nice mechanic because it implies that quality work and compliance to the corporation is rewarded. Due to my obedience (and cold-bloodedness) I was rewarded with a special tool for use during interrogation that allowed me to induce certain emotional responses from the subjects (more on this later). While in your apartment, you can only do three things: Review the after-interrogation report, watch the news (see a photo and one-line headline) and hibernate (sleep and go to the next interrogation). Your decisions during the interrogation will affect the story outcome in the sense that you will get some email response, often from the subjects themselves. Emails usually express appreciation for leniency, or espouse threats/guilt-trip you for having reformatted or decommissioned an "innocent" android. My biggest peeve with this game is that it did not provide me with a sense of moral ambiguity that goes in hand with cyberpunk literature. The biggest tell to this is the fact that you role-play as an android yourself, yet it is impossible to empathize (or in the case of your interview subjects, sympathize?) with the kinds of emotions, if any, an android is supposed to be feeling. The experience is not synonymous and the game forces the user to leap to this conclusion which is a disingenuous answer to the entire moral dilemma presented in previous writings. The game might make more sense if you were interviewing from the perspective from a human interrogator, or even better, if it is ambiguous, akin to Rick Deckard. I think the medium of a story based game from the first person perspective of an android doesn't translate well. There is sometimes a sense of powerlessness in the result of some interrogations, lending to the thought that "no matter what I say during the interrogation, I cannot control the outcome," and I am still unsure whether this was the developers' intention or if it is just weak game design. In terms of graphics, over 90% of this game's experience has its basis in the text alone. The writing is generally good, however its presentation is slightly unpolished. The world around the story's presentation is meant to provide immersion, and you will need to rely upon your imagination to at least some degree in order to fill in the gaps. There are a limited number of scenes that are visually represented in the game. If you can accept that this is a text-driven game, it shouldn't be a problem. Also, this is nit-picky, but I think a different font face for the holographic user interface would be better suited to the cyberpunk setting. Or, consider offering some options to the user. Overall though, I get that this is a story-based game and did not mind the graphical augmentations designed to help color the world. The game is short, and I completed it in about 5 hours. This is simply matter of fact, and not to its detriment in any way. I would have liked for the option of manual saves, but it is not offered. You must play through the entire game again to see different story paths. My impression is that the game was designed with a singular "good end" in mind. However I also believe that there are multiple endings that can be achieved. It might take some grinding through repeat dialogue to find all of them, and while I enjoyed my experience the first time through, the dialog is not so good that I would not mind reading through it all once again. Disclosure: I have completed a single play-through of this game and do not plan to continue playing it. After playing through the game, I was surprised by the lack of a "negative perspective" review on Steam, so I decided to provide one. I hope that the developers are not dissuaded by this feedback and continue developing games like this one, and believe that a sequel which expands upon the original, which incorporating this feedback would actually be an amazing contribution to the Steam store.