Review - Subsurface Circular
There are strange happenings in the undergrounds. Teks are going missing and it’s your job to figure out what is going on. Subsurface Circular is a new game created by Bithell Games, the same developer that made both Thomas was Alone and Volume. You play as a robot detective who has to investigate some strange disappearances from the inside of a subway car. While there were potentials for interesting mechanics and narrative options, Subsurface Circular passed most of those by to have a more standard text adventure experience. While it was somewhat interesting to talk to the various robots, it often left me wishing that the developers had gone one step further.
The gameplay is completely dialogue based. The player interacts with one of a few robots that enter the subway and sit around the player. After that, it is all text based discussion with the player choosing one of a few options to find out more information. While the game may give a pretext of being a graphical experience, Subsurface Circular boils down to a text based adventure with pretty pictures behind it. There is no interaction with the environment around the player beyond discussion and there is nothing to look at that will give clues as to what is going on. The game’s full commitment to a text-based experience was a massive missed opportunity. The developers spent all of the time to design an environment around the player only to almost completely ignore it. Flashing advertisements on the walls could have helped point the player towards more information and more gesticulation on the part of the robots that the player converses with would have helped to better gauge their attitude. Unfortunately, all that the player has to examine is the text in front of them.
While it may seem that the setting, being on a subway car, will become a key facet for gameplay, that is hardly the case. The subway is an excuse to have the player exist in a limited space with limited possible interactions. The subway moves, but only to certain positions on the map each act. This means that the player can’t, for instance, ride the subway in a circle forever because it will enter what appears to be an infinite tunnel between stations. This also points to the bigger issue of the subway: there is no dynamic passenger boarding. Basically, the game is divided into seven acts and each of those acts starts with a group of robots getting onto the subway. With only a few exceptions (some robots would enter and leave the train based on discussion cues), the robots that enter the subway at the start of the act would be who the player would talk to. Here you really see how arbitrary the setting is. The player could have been locked in a stationary room and had robots walk in and out without any difference to the player.
What I expected, and would have been more interesting, would have been to have passengers board and disembark at stations as though they were actually heading to some destination. What would likely happen in that case is that the player would have to speak to robots before they left the train or risk losing key knowledge. This would both make for more interesting gameplay, as the player would have to streamline dialogue instead of simply exhausting every option, and create replay-ability by having the potential, if not necessity, to miss pieces of information in any single run. As it is, the setting is a generic excuse to have only a few inter-actable objects available to the player at a time.
Given that this is a text-based adventure, there must be a decent narrative involved. Well, yes and no. The narrative itself is interesting. It focuses on human and artificial intelligence interaction while, at once, creating some commentary on the life of an immigrant worker. The latter is a common theme throughout the game, with the robots being depicted as the alien workers pushing out the native workforce. There are whole dialogue lines devoted to accounts of both violent and peaceful interactions with a bit of somewhat didactic commentary upon the topic. However, the stronger story is the dynamism between the human and AI elements within the game. It shows both the totalitarian failings of the human government, while painting an ominous, “Evitable Conflict”-esc reality of the AI being in charge. The result is that the conflict, and the inevitable choice at the end of the game, is painted in a single moral shade of gray that gives more humanity to both sides.
However, the process of engaging with the narrative is rather limited. There is a single track narrative that is played throughout the entire game with most dialogue consisting of a specific discussion with the robot in question, followed by asking said robot about all of the important questions available to the player. There is little variance or choice in the dialogue, with said choices most often only reflecting the mood with which the player wants to engage the other robot instead of any actual substance to the differences. Especially given the focus on dialogue, I would have liked to see more meaningful options when it came to what one could say to any of the robots. As it is, Subsurface Circular is a click through visual novel with very limited visuals.
Overall, Subsurface Circular is a game that could have been far more interesting than it turned out to be. As it is, it is a simple visual novel that ends up being an interesting, but not exceptional, read with poor gameplay. The visuals are almost completely meaningless, with most entities the player interacts with not moving at all throughout their conversations. The story clearly pulls heavily from Asimov’s works with an emphasis on seeing the rise of artificial intelligence from the A.I.’s perspective. However, in terms of gaming narratives this one is fairly simple given that the majority of the player’s actions have little to no effect on the outcome. If you’re looking for a quick, and rather light, read then this may well be the game for you. Outside of that, Subsurface Circular ended up being rather disappointing from both a narrative and gameplay perspective.
Asimov, Isaac. “The Evitable Conflict.” I, Robot. Bantam Spectra Books, 2004, pp. 240-272.
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