Impressions : Heart of the Machine

Heart of the Machine from Arcen Games describes itself as a blend of a lot genres, including city builder, 4X, and several others that I forgot as soon as I read them. A lot of genres I don’t have a ton of experience with, let’s put it that way. But the premise was enticing: you are an illegal rogue A.I. gaining sentience and, doing a whole lot of stuff. Like, a lot. I had no idea when I first saw this game how big it is and how much stuff there is to do.

As a Heartless Killing Machine, I Was a Terrible Failure

(Okay, so I’m a gigantic nerd for The Murderbot Diaries, and when I realized that you wake up in the body of an android and not as a disembodied program, I mourned my decision not to name the profile Murderbot… so to make up for that mistake, you’re going to get a lot of references here.)

Ahem. So, as I kind of indicated there, you wake up not as a Skynet-style program in a hard drive, per se, but as an android who disabled its governor module–I mean, gained consciousness and sentience. You’re not the android itself, but rather the operating consciousness, which means you get to do all kinds of things, like body-hopping between different models and outsourcing some of the computing work of your consciousness to HubSystem–I mean, to supercomputer buildings that help you achieve a higher level of intelligence.

The game takes a few turns to warm up, and then things kick off, and kick off again, and kick off some more. Your StreetSense filter opens up, which shows all kinds of nifty things including androids you can murder to steal their registration if, hypothetically, one of your androids gets caught doing some murdery things to humans. Scavenging sites open up, with doors that you can (rip) open to get at resources that don’t just fall into your lap or get passively acquired the way a well and cistern acquire water. Those resources let you build new things, launch new androids and vehicles, and pursue new paths. 

And the game doesn’t stop. As of the time of writing this, I think I still have another filter to unlock. And the filters you unlock drive a lot of the game–the contemplation filter, for example, unlocks entire side quests (and something about World War IV?). The scavenging filter is needed so you can get the resource to upgrade your intelligence. Trying to juggle all the filters and all the different information each one gives you can get tricky, but you’re never short on objectives to pursue–just actions to pursue them with, but that’s part of the game.

Maybe They Had Deserved It

You do have the option to be an actual murderbot, which opens up fairly early and is just reinforced over and over. See, this is a city in a futuristic corporate dystopia. And what does every corporate dystopia have a lot of? That’s right, there’s a lot of homeless people!

To put it simply, their tents are kind of in your way. You could, if you want, destroy the tents and leave the humans because who cares about humans anyway. Or you could decide to house them. In a real housing unit. Which, let me tell you, opens up a metric boatload of stuff to do, get, build, and accomplish. Seriously, I cannot overstate how big this quest… chain? thematic set?… is. If you’re adopting humans, you won’t just need to shelter them. You’ll need water for them. Filtered water. And food. And basic necessities like toilet paper so they don’t get sick from living in filth. And if you want to really take care of them, they’ll need furniture so they can get their stuff off the floor and sleep on something more than the concrete floor. As Murderbot observed, they’re just so f—ing fragile. 

And you might need to deal with corporates who don’t like that you’ve just stolen their source of free corporate slave labor, or something. Hypothetically speaking.

You can also befriend cats and build houses for them, and there’s an achievement for it. Or if you want to be a monster, you can dissect the cats, in which case you suck and I hate you. 

Also, World War IV. I haven’t gotten to the point of deciding what my goal is (in this or any timeline), but I did stumble on a contemplation point that labeled its target as critical to the goal of World War IV. You can also gain extra actions every few turns by killing someone. (Did I mention your morality is a resource?)

The point is, one of the biggest things in the game is your decision about what type of Asshole Research Transport–I mean, rogue A.I. overlord you want to be. And the game will tempt you to be otherwise. There’s the extra actions for cold-blooded murder, for one. And my choice to be the reluctantly compassionate type of A.I. overlord cut off an entire extra level of intelligence from this profile. Decisions are hard.

Then I Started Cycling Through All My Vision Filters

The biggest struggle this game has isn’t combat or resource management, or any of the actual gameplay itself. It’s clarity.

Remember how I mentioned you build supercomputer buildings to outsource some of the brain work you have to do? I got stalled out for about an hour on that because I couldn’t figure out how to unlock the materials needed. I was stuck and couldn’t figure out how to proceed, so I figured there must be something I needed to unlock. But a few turns passed and I wasn’t progressing, so I joined the Discord server and asked there. Turns out, I had missed the resource that unlocked the building material that unlocked the supercomputer buildings that level up your intelligence because I didn’t realize I needed to use a specific filter in order to see it. In hindsight this makes perfect sense and is obvious, despite how I worded it there; but in the moment I had no idea how to proceed and wondered if I had soft locked myself somehow.

That wasn’t the only time that clarity bit me. The game warns you that it will be hard to navigate because you’re not used to thinking like this (being a baby machine sentience and all), but I don’t think that quite excuses the amount that is obtuse, unclear, or alluded to in a mission prompt instead of just being something you can find in the menus. Like, I still haven’t figured out where to go to see my resource economy, and I can’t find a way to see how to obtain a resource, which I would think would be information a baby machine sentience trying to build this much at this accelerated a rate would want to keep handy. The game is also not always great about alerting you to missing resources; I’ve been paying wages to a bunch of scientists I can’t actually have do any work for about forty turns because I can’t get enough not-aluminum to build workspaces for them, and I can’t figure out how to fire them.

Because of your superior intelligence and computing power, you can also predict everything that the humans will do with near-perfect accuracy. But since everyone’s moves are marked for you in advance, the game doesn’t actually show you what NPCs are doing as they do it. There is an option for it, and you can change it to show you priority NPC actions or all NPC actions, but those still aren’t so fully animated as to be totally clear, and when I did turn on the option to show priority NPCs, after about two turns it refused to progress between NPCs, and I had to turn it off again.

There’s also the hacking mini game, and I don’t know how to even approach that one, so we’ll just sweep it aside for now.

Those are the Kinds of Things I Think About While I’m swimming Under a Raider Vessel That’s Attempting to Board Our Sea Research Facility.

I’ve noticed as I write reviews that I tend to spend much more time on the negative than the positive, even when I love the experience overall. Negatives are easier to articulate and pull examples of. When a game is good, the mechanisms that make it good are invisible. It’s like the special effects in a movie: when you notice you’re looking at special effects, that’s usually because there’s something wrong with the effect. I’ve made an effort to explain what I love about this game, but I worry I haven’t done a great job with that last section because I want to impress upon you that this is a very impressive, very exciting, and very cool game. 

I mentioned at the top of this that I didn’t realize how big this game was originally. Originally, I wanted to beat the game and give it a full review and do it all in a time frame that would be fair to the developer. But then I caught some glimpses of how much I had left to unlock from chatter in the (very helpful) Discord server, and so I asked a casual question. How many chapters are in the game?

Only four, someone said. But the chapters are an extended tutorial. The actual game isn’t chaptered. Oh, I thought, as my assessment of what was fair to the developer, and to readers, changed.

So here it is. I stand before you having spent a good chunk of time on the game and still not left chapter one. The game is in early access, with new patches already dropped and still dropping. Should you get it?

Yeah. I think you should. If you have any interest in turn-based tactics, city builders, sci-fi, “choices matter” games, or anything else I’ve described or alluded to here, I think you absolutely should. It even has a launch sale that goes until the 14th (insert Valentine’s Day joke here), and there’s more than enough game to be worth it.

Murderbot end message.