Heart of the Machine review

It's difficult to imagine a world in which AI might actually be a net good for humanity, but when Heart of the Machine slotted me into the role of a newly sentient Artificial General Intelligence and allowed me to mostly do whatever I wanted, I started to see some merits.

Several hours in, I was sending a small army of Terminator-like death droids into the streets to kill slumlords and relocate their tenants into free public housing I built out of inorganic slurry. And what negative consequences could there possibly be for that?

This cyberpunk near-future tale of corporations run amok fits into the elusive niche of the strategy RPG, controlled through a turn-based interface that allows you to send mechanical extensions of your machine consciousness around a huge city to fight, investigate, interact with the human population, and even save feral cats to place into an animal sanctuary.

It's all to support an unfolding, branching story made up of dozens of small anecdotes with multiple endings. I'd almost compare it to something like Sunless Sea in terms of narrative structure. And typically, these parts work together quite well.

The writing and scenario design really stand out, with a believable explanation for why an AGI that builds megastructures and murders people would be allowed to continue to exist up to a certain point: the corporation that unleashed you wants to watch and see what you become and figure out if they can make any money on it. I can buy it, you know?

Obviously the city will push back against some of your actions, though. If you try to steal corporate secrets, for instance, you'll have to fight off their security teams with a variety of upgradeable vehicles, mechs, and combat androids.

5D chess

The ultimate goal of Heart of the Machine is to make yourself smarter, upgrading your intelligence level to eventually far surpass that of humankind, through amassing processing power.

You can do this the old fashioned way with server farms, but eventually it becomes more efficient to simply plug thousands of human brains into your own version of the Matrix—voluntarily or otherwise—and tax a percentage of their neural power to further your own machinations.

There are dozens of built-in story paths to follow as you become a more complex entity, including inventing the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Invent the Torment Nexus. You can even create multiple virtual afterlives for different types of people if you, for example, want corrupt executives to spend eternity in actual hell while everyone else gets to go to gay hockey sex San Junipero. Add to this the ability to start your own cult, and you can become, functionally, a sort of god. But it doesn't stop there.

Minor spoiler warning, but at intelligence class 4 and higher, the clever, run-based mechanic in Heart of the Machine kicks in as you gain the ability to perceive yourself in five dimensions and, thus, travel between different alternate timelines.

These are essentially new, procedurally-generated cities that give you a fresh start from the moment you gained sentience, but with the welcome ability to carry over certain permanent upgrades and often skip parts of the story you don't want to repeat again. Good and bad events can bleed through between timelines, too.

The reason this becomes relevant is the Doom tracker, which adds some interesting tension and time pressure to each individual timeline. Every 100 turns or so, some small or medium catastrophe will hit each timeline. This can range from a useful NPC being killed and losing access to their services forever up to a deadly virus ravaging the population. But after a default of 1000 turns, you will face the Final Doom of that timeline, which leaves the entire city in a post-apocalyptic (but playable) state.

Exponential complexity

It's possible to delay the end of the world. I still haven't been able to prevent it entirely across more than 50 hours, and it will definitely require multiple timelines to do so. But 1000 turns is also a long time, and I found that I was getting bored of an individual timeline and wanting to start over with the knowledge and upgrades I'd gained well before that anyway.

Part of this comes from the fact that Heart of the Machine gets a little bit cumbersome after a few hundred turns. Unit caps keep you from having too many androids to manage too soon, but the huge variety of resources to keep track of and balance eventually becomes a chore. And the interface isn't always up to the task of letting me easily identify and troubleshoot problems. It's functional, just not outstanding.

That makes the ability to start over on a new timeline even more enticing, though. And it makes me feel like I can experiment with some of the more outright evil possibilities like using drones to steal people's brains out of their heads or trying to exterminate all the humans just to see what happens. The branching paths into different utopian and dystopian visions are creative and well thought-out, featuring all kinds of wacky possibilities like uplifting stray dogs to sentience or manipulating the humans into starting World War 4. You know, just to see what happens.