Subsurface Circular is really a visual novel, despite its appearance as a fully rendered-3D game. Or, I suppose more accurately, a visual novella – this is a short work, clocking in at about 2 hours of run time, or just shy of 3 if you’re going to try absolutely everything.
You play as a robotic detective, a high-functioning model with human-level intelligence whose job it is to solve crimes. The Management who oversees the city keeps a tight leash on the high-functioning robots, believing them to be useful, but also dangerous, and as such, you are confined to a single rail car unless ordered otherwise.
This conceit allows the game to be hyperminimalist in its presentation – all that needs to appear is a bit of subway wall outside of the windows of the subway car as you travel around in a loop, as well as the inside of the car, and the other passengers, all of which are fellow robots.
The game starts off with you talking (via a private text channel) to a robot whose fellow robotic friend has gone missing. While you aren’t supposed to take on cases that are outside of your directives, the robots pleas change your mind and so you embark on a (more or less text-based) adventure, as you talk to various robots as they come on and off of the train in order to find out if there have been any more disappearances. Over the course of the game you hear about a robot who might or might not be rebelling against its masters, humans who are resentful of the robots taking their work, and see various glimpses of what the world around you is like via your conversations with the robots on the train. You solve various simple puzzles and use keywords like inventory items; hearing a new keyword adds it to what amounts to an inventory, allowing you to ask other robots about it.
The game, such as it is, is entirely based around dialogue; you never leave your seat throughout the course of the entire game, with the robots around you getting on and off as you reach each stage of the game’s story to give you fresh dialogue opportunities. You get to choose your character’s name and general tone, as well as how they react to and treat their fellow robots, and you get to fill in bits of your backstory as you see fit via your dialogue choices.
All of the dialogue is presented through text rather than audio – there’s no voice acting in this game, save for the speakers announcing your arrival at various subway stations. There is some animation, but it is pretty minimal; while the environment is entirely 3D (and has very high production values – the game actually looks like an AAA product visually), the robots only move a fairly minimal amount, mostly getting on and off of the train and occasionally shifting position as they speak to you.
You encounter a wide variety of robots over the course of the game, and you get some sense of their roles in society, as well as their overall muted personalities. You can see that they’re a bit sterile – indeed, robotic. A lot of them feel very one-dimensional, and as you learn more about the society your character lives in, it becomes obvious that is by design – and the game further reinforces this sort of caste system by presenting a few high-functioning robots as being much more prone to eccentricity and actually feeling a bit more like people (though not even that is consistent, which didn’t bother me when I was playing the game, but is a bit bothersome in retrospect, as encountering a fellow detective didn’t feel like facing off against an equal and opposite opposing force, but one of the more robotic of your fellows).
If you’re looking for any sort of sophisticated gameplay here, however, you’re apt to be disappointed; most of the puzzles basically boil down to “use the dialogue choice to progress the plot”, with the dialogue choice getting picked up off of some other robot in the train car, with only a small handful of puzzles that were more than that, and were still quite simple. There is absolutely no action at all to this game – indeed, you never leave your seat even once during the course of the game, meaning there’s no moving around or anything other than talking to robots. Indeed, this is one of those games which makes you question whether or not it is truly a game at all – it is much more akin to a visual novel than anything else, in truth.
I am rather torn about my feelings on the game. On the one hand, I feel like it had some interesting ideas, and I actually wanted to try and fix things, or at least keep the protagonist safe, both of which are good – having intellectual and emotional attachment to what is going on is a good sign.
But on the other hand, the end felt almost too weighty, and the game’s central plot twist feels like it makes the game far more intense than it was otherwise, and the scope of my work felt like it took a rather jarring expansion at the end, going from personal to much more macro – and thus, ironically, actually harming the emotional stakes, as I had no real connection to the humans that my decision would affect, as none of them had ever appeared on-screen.
The ending felt a little bit arbitrary as well – the choice I was presented with honestly didn’t feel like it had enough context or sense, and while the person presenting it had their reasons, I felt like there was no reason why the protagonist would indeed have to make a choice there. As a result, despite all of the other options in the game feeling rather decent on the whole (even if they were just about choosing my character’s personality rather than actually impacting the plot), the ending made me feel like my hand was being forced in a way that the rest of the game didn’t – despite the rest of the game being a literal and figurative railroad plot, the end of the game, where it actually gives you a choice to make, felt more railroaded than the rest of it by comparison.
This is kind of paradoxical, but I think it makes sense – given the extremity of the action in the ending compared to the more subtle action of the rest of the plot, being forced to act, and act in such an extreme way, felt more forced than the more subtle choices you made along the ways of the preordained plot.
The other thing about this game is that it is very short. And while I do appreciate that the game didn’t waste my time, on the other hand, I suspect a lot of people might be a bit leery of buying a game that is only two hours long (though given it is only $5.99, it is priced quite reasonably for a shorter experience).
All in all, this is one of those games I’m left feeling lukewarm about. I was interested in what it offered, but simultaneously I’m not sure that it actually delivered on it. I didn’t really feel satisfied by the ending of the game, and that soured me a bit on the whole thing – the ending is ultimately the last thing you experience, and thus, your feelings towards the game are likely to be influenced the most by that. And ultimately, it felt like the same issue that Mass Effect 3’s ending had, where you had extreme choices to make in response to a more complex situation.
Overall, this is one of those wavering thumb things. If the conceit of this game really grabs you, and the idea of sitting around in a traincar talking to robots to solve a mystery sounds fun, this might be up your alley. If you’re looking for any sort of action or complicated puzzles, you need to steer clear, as this is one of those games that is almost exclusively a narrative experience, with only weak "game" elements. And if extreme actions in endings put you off, this game might end up disappointing you in the end.
2.5