I did not anticipate that I would enjoy Mike Bithell's 2017 adventure game short Subsurface Circular as much as I did (IGotW #97), about a group of robots riding the subway and having discussions about the events and politics happening topside. That early apprehension had nothing to do with my opinions on Bithell's previous works, which have always been excellently written with a professional sheen that often eludes Indies (even when it was just talking boxes), but more to do with my social anxiety and how much of that is predicated by my limited emotional intelligence and ability to read people (or sapient robots, as the case may be). Subsurface Circular was a visual novel in the sense that interactivity mostly just boiled down to simple dialogue choices that would branch the story path, but for as often as I felt the tension in those scenes everything was conveyed in such a layered yet coherent way that I instead found myself enjoying the act of navigating its webs of deceit and power plays.

Quarantine Circular, the 2018 spiritual follow-up, changes the premise and setting but retains what I would consider the core of having an intense series of dialogues with a potentially hostile being looking to convince you to trust it for unknown reasons. The pitch is that mankind is on a slow descent to oblivion due to an unstoppable virus—the game had the misfortune of preceding the COVID epidemic by a year and change, though it's possible the game's inspiration came from early grumblings about the damage this unknown disease may yet wreak or an antecedent such as SARS—and, in the midst of it all, an alien being wearing power armor suddenly arrives in a Croatian city and is quickly captured by what global authorities remain in control of mankind's crumbling infrastructure. This being, symbolically named Gabriel due to its descent from the sky in lieu of any direct translation of its name, insists that it has arrived to help humanity survive what may become an extinction-level event using its advanced anti-viral technologies and methodologies; however, humanity remains skeptical and already on-edge due to the unfolding tragedy, with rumors floating around that the disease might be extraterrestrial in origin. Thrown into this mess is an engineer named Marc Perez, whose job it is to modify existing translation tools to help understand Gabriel's words and inadvertently finds himself being the first person to communicate with a sapient non-human being.

What follows are a set of tense discussions with this visitor, who is not best pleased about their predicament but due to their enlightened nature is attempting to be patient and understanding. It doesn't help that Gabriel is an intimidating ten-foot-tall alien in glowing armor that vaguely resembles a lobster, like Garrus Vakarian if he'd been hitting the juice once too often. One of the first things Gabriel asks is to release an electric shock collar that was used to quarantine them in place; that's not the kind of choice one can easily make on the spot, especially if you're a low-level government employee working way beyond your pay grade and doubly so if it means this visitor, about whom you know nothing, might then decide you could use far fewer limbs. Further discussions with Gabriel, alternating viewpoints between multiple protagonists (including Gabriel as well), continues to provide hard choices for the player regarding how much humanity can afford to pass up any opportunity given the dwindling chances to beat this plague, no matter how dubious the source, and regardless of what the repercussions might be.

The game does its job well, which is to say the job of making me second-guess every dialogue tree response and branching path and be in a constant state of low-level anxiety about how badly I might be screwing up the future of the planet. Something mildly reassuring is that the players involved, from the admiral in charge to the brightest scientists to the hardheaded idealist Gabriel themself, are kind of playing this thing by ear as they go along as well, no side fully able to trust the other's intentions. It effectively turns the narrative into one of those small, intimate character plays of unreliable narrators so beloved of Samuel Beckett and the like, despite the hard science-fiction angle of negotiating with an alien for help in eliminating an apocalyptic supervirus. It does, after all, boil down to using one's communication skills to adroitly navigate complex interpersonal discourse where all participants are, by necessity, having to hide information or are trying to be sufficiently convincing in order to gain trust; a skillset I'm about as effective at as speaking Spanish (and check the previous IGotW episode to see how that went). Even so, like with the last Circular, the story feels railroaded just enough that the choices aren't quite as load-bearing as you might dread, though many will still affect future dialogue, and the story is well-written enough that even bad choices lead to interesting outcomes. Even the game's closest equivalent to an antagonist (besides the virus), an overly enthusiastic security officer named Teng Lei, is motivated by her desire to keep humanity safe from an unknown and potentially dangerous extraterrestrial threat making wild promises for no apparent gain. Easy to get a little skeptical at such an offer, especially if it comes to light that said alien is working against the wishes of the formal governance ruling the galaxy.

The game is around short story length, so about three hours tops, though there's some amount of going back and futzing with previous decisions to see different outcomes; you only have to go about twenty minutes back via the chapter select menu to change the most impactful decision if you wanted to see all the endings, which isn't so bad in lieu of a more convenient timeline/flowchart feature. There feels like a small nod to the world of Subsurface Circular too, though I may have been reading too much into it; the two games are otherwise unrelated, besides a similar format. I plan to play a lot of VNs this month, being Novelmber and all, so this served as a palatable aperitif for what I hope to be a relatively chill month for gaming. Bithell's since moved onto licensed fare—he put out both a Tron game and a John Wick game after this, as well as that Solitaire Conspiracy thing—but I hope he decides to dabble in this genre again with another "Circular" someday, since his worldbuilding and ear for dialogue are often the highlights of his work. Which, man, kinda sounds like a backhanded compliment now I've read it back; see what I mean about my less-than-stellar communication skills? Hopefully this review came off as legible at least.

Rating: 4 out of 5.