Inhuman Resources: A Literary Machination is a short interactive piece of horror fiction, with dystopian elements. While primarily a reading experience not unlike a visual novel, it features light RPG mechanics and a strong focus on the choices you make along the way.
What Lies Within Smyrnacorp?
Finding a job is a horrible experience. Already overdue on rent and after facing countless rejections, a job opportunity with Smyrnacorp appears. Something certainly feels off about it as soon as you arrive, but at this point, anything is worth trying, right?
You soon find out it’s worse than you could have imagined. Beyond the receptionist with the unnatural smile and unusual interview questions, there are crimes that would horrify many and secrets that could change the world’s fate if revealed. And you’ve just been hired to help them with not even the option of death as an escape. Their surveillance and a certain technology will make sure of that.
One ray of hope appears. You’re contacted by a mysterious voice who wants to take down the company and needs your help. Can you make it out of this alive and regain your freedom? What horrors will you be subject to or need to perform along the way? It’s best to experience Inhuman Resources: A Literary Machination for yourself to find out.
As you play, you’ll unravel exactly what Smyrnacorp does, meet several interesting characters to explore their varied perspectives on the work they do, and even run into the odd office affair.
Shadowy Organization
Reading through Inhuman Resources: A Literary Machination feels rather disconcerting. It’s not just the horrors that are slowly revealed to you as you train in different departments or how it slowly builds up a sense of tension with foreshadowing, but in how the game is presented and involves the player.
Perhaps one of the most important aspects of this is the sense of making choices that make a difference. Choices are frequent and may give you items or increase your skills, which then lead to new options further down the line. Even before that though, just the action of choosing feels weighty when it makes you hold down the button for several seconds to select. This can be as innocent as asking a simple question or as morally dubious as pulling someone’s teeth out, but it’s made clear that these choices are not made without clear intention. It doubles down on this with the design choice of only having auto-save and not allowing the player to go back and make alternate choices, even after finishing the game. It can be a pity in some ways as there are a few endings, but it works well here.
What does perhaps take away from it a little is that many of the choices don’t actually matter too much. There are many ways to get to the same point and some of the details change along the way, but you’ll get there in the end. Still, it certainly succeeds at making it feel like it matters.
I should also note that there were very occasional hiccups along the way. At points, you can change the order of tasks or make different decisions, and the dialogue would incorrectly reflect other possibilities that I didn’t choose at that time. It’s quite minor, so hopefully it’ll be fixed post-release.
Not Just Reading
While Inhuman Resources: A Literary Machination is mostly reading with choices to determine your path, there are some other gameplay elements.
Some scenes require you to interact with a password lock to proceed. The password can be incredibly obvious, stated very recently in the dialogue, or you may need to delve further into dialogue options with someone in the room to get a hint. It’s never too difficult but adds a bit of further interaction to the experience.
An example that requires more effort is a task where you need to watch videos, and then find a timestamp of the footage that matches a sometimes cryptic hint. The footage itself is black and white and grainy. I did sometimes find this a little frustrating because I found it difficult to see what was going on, but fortunately, this doesn’t occur too often.
There are also a few times when you need to access a computer and look at files to find information or perform some other minor tasks to proceed. While I can’t say I was a fan of the video task, these types of gameplay elements did provide a brief break and again added some weight to the idea of embodying the character who was performing tasks for Smyrnacorp and thus being complicit.
Too Big Smiles and Beeping
I used the term “disconcerting” to describe Inhuman Resources: A Literary Machination and the audiovisual side is used to great effect to create that atmosphere.
The art style is an incredibly fitting choice for this type of story, with several unnaturally happy portraits and heavily shadowed figures. The icons and user interface pair nicely with these too. At key moments, colors invert to create a sense of danger. Techniques such as changing to unsettling pieces of background music, silence, or the beep of a monitoring tool are used well on top of this. These work brilliantly to create a sense of tension, even moreso when it’s a sudden change.
Verdict
Inhuman Resources: A Literary Machination is a story worth experiencing. With choices that feel weighty, this horror story feels even more unsettling as it’s made clear that you’re the one taking control of the path your story takes and your actions along the way.
INHUMAN RESOURCES: A LITERARY MACHINATION IS RECOMMENDED
If you are looking for another indie horror game, check out Hollowbody. Or, if you’re interested in a text-based adventure game of a different sort, check out No Case Should Remain Unsolved.
Many thanks go to Indie Asylum for a PC review code for Inhuman Resources: A Literary Machination.
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
