It's Thanksgiving today, and what could be more festive than a group of disaffected robots discussing transhumanism? That's more or less the impetus of Mike Bithell's 2017 "short", Subsurface Circular: a largely passive adventure game in which a detective robot interviews a series of other androids on the titular underground conveyance about what they know and who they are.

I knew going into this game that I'd run into the potential issue of having very little to say. It's a story-driven game that depends a lot on learning new information and piecing together the truth behind the central mystery, neither of which are served by too much expatiation from yours truly. Likewise, the interface is a simple dialogue tree wherein you select responses to gather information or make decisions. It's not the kind of game with a lot of puzzles, though there are a few that involve bouncing between conversations, or much in the way of branching paths. If it can be said to be "replayable" at all, it's in how you can review the same discussions with the context provided by the final twist, but for the most part it's a short story made interactive.

The appeal of Subsurface Circular is, naturally enough given its genre, the witty and insightful writing. Each of Mike Bithell's games, from Thomas Was Alone to Volume, has had an entirely playable action-puzzle foundation built to support a lot of clever dialogue and incidental narration. Bithell clearly gets a lot of satisfaction from spinning his narratives and constructing puzzles alike, but it feels like the former has finally superseded the latter in this case, and in the case of the structurally similar follow-up Quarantine Circular. Even if the game is heavily text-based, the clean and well-lit look of the game's various robot models - each of whom has enough to distinguish themselves from the others, even without faces - and that of the Subsurface Circular itself lend the game a harsh, angular but compelling look. It's a continuation of Bithell's polygon-focal presentation for Volume, which is explicitly stated to exist in the same universe.

The game has exactly one puzzle in which I might suggest breaking out a pen and pad or a notepad file if that's more your speed - a deductive logic puzzle that took me a few tries to get right - while the rest often rely on simply gleaning a piece of information from one passenger and using that to progress your dialogue tree with another. Like many great compact Indie games, it feels like one small aspect of a much bigger RPG or adventure game taken to an extreme level of commitment; the sort of dialogue tree puzzles that might exist in a BioWare RPG if it had more development time fleshing that particular element out, rather than mech suits and colored loot or whatever else they're doing these days. If a game wholly based on those types of instances appeals to you, or you enjoy stories about robots discussing what it means to be human (or being a self-aware artificial intelligence in a human world) in a frequently droll and urbane manner, I'd recommend checking out this excellent value adventure game.

Rating: 4 out of 5.