No, I'm not a Human Review - Deep, Dull, or Just Deranged?

So very disturbing...

It’s the middle of the night. Your neighbor comes knocking to tell you something strange is happening with the sun, and there are people coming up from underground that everyone is calling “Visitors”. Who these Visitors are and what they want is unknown – all you know is that letting one into your home is extremely dangerous, but you also can’t be alone lest the Visitors decide to just barge in. Whatever these Visitors are, they are not the same as us.

So begins No, I’m Not a Human: an eerie, dreamlike mix of Papers, Please and visual novel that uses a stunningly hideous presentation and a bizarre, paranoid atmosphere to tell a uniquely unpleasant tale about the end of the world. Did it succeed in getting under my skin with its morbid stories, or is this more a cautionary tale in style over substance?

The game loop of No, I’m Not a Human is based around a day/night cycle where daytime means everybody must stay inside, lest the scorching sun burn them alive, and nighttime is when both humans and Visitors roam the streets, seeking shelter by knocking on random doors and asking to come in. You’ll chat with each of them through your front door’s peephole, and by any metric these conversations are incredibly strange. Where you might, in a normal apocalyptic scenario, expect scared strangers desperately asking for refuge from whatever awaits them in the night, you’ll often instead have midnight knockers muttering cryptic riddles, rudely demanding entry, and making weird jokes or bizarrely specific requests. Whether you ultimately let them in is usually up to you, other than a few scenarios where it’s not, but this is where arguably the biggest problem with No, I’m Not a Human rears its unintentionally ugly head. In true Papers, Please-esque fashion, you’ll be given specific indicators as the nights continue on how to spot a Visitor – be it the whiteness of their teeth, hairiness of their armpits or a variety of other factors.

But for reasons completely beyond my comprehension, at no point are you given the ability to check any of these factors at the door. Rather, you have to choose to let people in or turn them away based on whatever completely arbitrary vibe you get from the conversation – a difficult proposition when almost everybody who approaches is such a goddamn weirdo. Once these people are actually in your house and there are no more knockers coming that night, you can go back to bed and wake up to the day portion of the in-game cycle. During the day, you’ll open each of the several doors in your home and be greeted with a point and click interface of the room – a static picture with various interactable elements and often strange, obtusely shaped furniture or objects the main character will make unusual observations about.

Your guests will reside within these rooms, hanging out on their own waiting to have conversations with you. You can hear bits and pieces of each guest’s story as you continue to chat with them, or you can spend one of a few limited energy points to give them a test. Make them show you their eyes, fingernails, armpits or otherwise in search of the telltale signs of a Visitor. If you determine they are one, you can whip out your gun and confront them about it and pull the trigger if you must.

There are a huge variety of reasons that this gameplay loop simply makes no sense. On one hand, it’s valid to ask why I’m looking for sense in this insane world that clearly doesn’t aim to neatly show you all of the cards it has in play. After all, one of the core tenets of the cosmic horror genre that No, I’m Not a Human seems deeply inspired by and I’m generally a huge fan of is fear of the unknown, and emphasis on the mood that creates rather than any genuine effort to neatly fit the pieces together. That’s all well and good, yet this isn’t just a narrative but a game as well, and it’s a game that feels like it has little in the way of sensible internal logic. In each day cycle, the number of energy points you have is dictated by… well, frankly, I never quite figured out why I had two on some days or three on others, though use of items you can order from a grocery delivery service can affect the number you’re given.

As I mentioned earlier, every time you choose to test one of your tenants, you lose one of these energy points. This seems straightforward enough, but as the potential warning signs of a Visitor build up, it’s intentionally unclear how many are needed for even a semi-conclusive answer. Visitors tend to have bloodshot eyes, but can’t a human have bloodshot eyes and just be tired? Visitors tend to have dirt under their fingernails, but can’t a human into gardening have the same? It’s unclear where exactly the game stands on this, though I do feel that’s the intention in order to create a paranoid atmosphere. But given that an energy point allows you to test only one of these things at a time, as the days go on you won’t even have enough energy to thoroughly test one person, never mind everyone in the house. Why can’t you just ask somebody to put their eyes or nails up to the peephole before letting them in? The game seemingly doesn’t have an answer to this.

The logical inconsistencies don’t end there. For example, at one point I asked one of my tenants, “Wait, didn’t you have a kid with you before?” and she said “Yeah, she left” all while the kid is literally sitting next to her on the couch. For another example, you can order groceries for next-day delivery and they always come that same night. Ordering groceries shortly after receiving some will grant a message about already having a pending order even when you don’t. And in yet another case, a stranger that came over to check on folks that were staying with me asked how they were doing, and because I decided to reply along the lines of “I don’t give a damn, I have my own shit to deal with”, he conclusively assumed they were all dead and reacted accordingly, with no further questions. And perhaps most jarring of all, while less a logical inconsistency and more just an immersion-breaking design choice, tenants don’t tend to interact or react to one another even if I just shot a person in the same room as them.

On some nights, you’ll be visited by a hazmat-suited representative of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Given the game’s persistently dreamlike nature and the role FEMA plays in the plot, something about its inclusion feels really strange. I don’t know why they couldn’t have just made up a fictional organization rather than co-opt the name of a real one that helps a lot of people but fine, whatever. FEMA reps will frequently ask to take some of your tenants with them for “testing”, which means if you’ve been trying to learn more about any particular character, they may very well be gone before you have a chance. There’s a slight element of player control here in the form of FEMA notices you can hand out to tenants you may suspect of being Visitors or just want gone, but these are so limited in quantity throughout the game that it’s hard to find them especially useful.

Stellar writing could have elevated the game to a point that massages some of these problems away, but sadly the writing is one of No, I’m Not a Human’s biggest problems. The main character’s observations about the world are baffling in a bad way sometimes, like when you click on a magazine in the home office area and they say “One of those magazines where you gotta find a certain person in the crowd… must be annoying. Wish people would just leave me alone already…” Again, I get that the game wants to be weird, but this is the sort of writing I would expect in Shenmue III – if you know, you know. Most of the game’s writing fares better than that one example, but not by much, frequently either being too on-the-nose to conjure any genuine feelings of dread or so self-indulgently cryptic as to just make me want to click through the dialogue as quickly as possible.

Thankfully, where the writing and gameplay in No, I’m Not a Human tremendously falter in almost every way, its dreadfully creepy presentation does its absolute best to prop it up. Your home is a cold, discomforting place that feels foreign and grimy. Character models are malformed and sometimes strangely bloated caricatures of real-looking people that bring immediate discomfort even when the stranger in question seems relatively benign. The few first-person character animations that exist look stunning in their own right while fitting right in with the weird, otherworldly tone. And the soundtrack, which feels like it could be right at home in a darker, even bleaker version of Disco Elysium, elevates the overall feeling of discomfort as best it can. Despite a lack of official controller support, the game runs quite well on Steam Deck, with few enough inputs that the left analog stick, track pad and right trigger do mostly enough to make the default keyboard and mouse controls work.

Sadly, despite the stellar presentation, what No, I’m Not a Human boils down to is a set of gameplay systems so poorly conceived that its visuals and soundtrack have to pull a Weekend at Bernie’s situation to salvage whatever morsels of quality they can. Instead of making the act of screening visitors interesting, the game just makes doing so pointlessly inefficient, with vague rules that make the challenge more about guessing the right people to let in knowing you can only properly vet a small number of them. The internal inconsistencies everywhere and fact that tenants can be randomly removed from your home at any time make it hard to care about anything going on, and the somewhat weak writing coupled with the story’s refusal to be especially coherent only reinforces this.

My emotional stake in its dreary world, as a result, feels stunted from the start. No amount of cool artwork and music can hide my total disinterest in what most characters are saying and how I’m supposed to interact with them. Accordingly, the horror aspect falls flat on its face when the level of immersion required for a proper sense of paranoid dread to kick in is constantly being undermined. There are a lot of interesting ideas here, but their execution simply fails to do them justice. I suspect a number of folks will enjoy No, I’m Not a Human based on its fantastic presentation alone, but the game under that surface disappointed me at nearly every turn, consistently making me feel that this could have just been a standard visual novel and been better off for it. No, I’m Not a Human has some redeeming qualities, but far too many issues outweighing them and gets the table lamp of mediocrity.

MEDIOCRE