There is a great moral weight in making decisions in No, I’m Not Human. Anxiety and paranoia, two of the brain’s most devilish tricks, become your enemy. When a great cataclysm looms and the sun begins to implode, humanity must survive. You are a key figure in helping both strangers and neighbours live, but if you welcome in the wrong person, others will surely die. It’s a social deduction experiment masquerading as a horror game, and Trioskaz has got you in its iron grip.
The main premise revolves around a day and night cycle. At night, people knock on your door to ask for shelter. Based on what they say, specific quirks, or the way they look, you either take them in or send them on their way. If someone looks the slightest bit dishevelled or unbalanced, they could be a Visitor; one of the evil aliens born as a result of the impending apocalypse. They could also be someone who is struggling to survive, and their appearance could be a result of sleeping rough and fighting for their lives.
Engaging in conversations might leave you unsure. They might say something that doesn’t sound quite right. Maybe you have a relatively normal conversation, yet because they seem like a human, it might be because the Visitors have mastered humanity’s ways. It’s a minefield. Your own moral choices and beliefs impact who is welcomed into your house. Knowing who the right people to let in often boils down to luck. You may think your decisions are based on facts, but that’s just your mind playing tricks on you.
For my first playthrough, I was that unsure of every person that I let nobody in. Without spoiling anything, this is 100% the wrong approach. You need people in your home to survive the true threat of No, I’m Not Human. When you do have enough people in your home, there’s a chance one will die every night as someone among them is a Visitor. It’s unsettling, playing of your paranoia to create the real horrors at play. While there’s non knocking in the day, it gets no better for you.
During the day cycle, you can interact with those you’ve welcomed in for clues about the outside world – about them – and it may sway you to believe one isn’t who they say they are. The choice to cast them out comes around, but what happens if you make the wrong decision? Not only that, government officials will turn up and drag away anyone they believe to be a Visitor. If there’s only a few left in your house, there’s a good chance the one true Visitor will get inside whether you let him in or not.
The anxiety it creates leaves you not knowing who to trust. While you can listen for clues about what Visitors might look like on television broadcasts or radio transmissions, I was never truly sure who was or wasn’t what they said they were. It’s simple concept makes each playthrough interesting as much as it leaves you feeling scared. The visuals are purposely surreal as they blur your perceptions of personal appearance. No, I’m Not Human takes the ‘Papers, Please’ concept and pushes it to its limits, turning you into God.
There were some guests that I genuinely felt sympathy for, before turning them away to face their fate, of course. Hearing sob stories only to deny them anyway made me feel like Simon Cowell, albeit slightly more cruel. Everyone could be scared and alone, lost in this new terrifying world. Everyone could be bloodthirsty monsters waiting to kill. The only thing stopping these deaths happening is you. While the rotation of the cycles is simple, the choices and the stories presented to you play with your emotions and psyche every step of the way.
No, I’m Not Human is a clever decision-based title. The real horror comes from your choices. The two headed-beast that lives inside your mind governs the mini kingdom that is your house, and knowing what to do simply boils down to how you feel about someone. It’s visuals are simple yet disturbing, and the sound design is also impressive, opting for less is more. It does offer frustration with having no real control of who the Visitors are, but how would that be different from something like this happening in reality?
