continually eludes rational understanding, often brazenly so with each ending feeling like the twist climax to an entirely different game,,,on its own it might Explain Everything, but forced to exist with everything else it becomes a free associative nightmare with no bottom to the pit. and yet emotionally , it remains completely and constantly coherent...from the initially stressful Social Horror as u learn the mechanics, to the intimate horror of dissociation from the self, to the cosmic horror of the impossibility of quantifying a self at all...at least, not one that can be controlled by you. thank god you're Not you! you cant imagine anything worse then being you

laser targeted at at least fifteen of my mental illnesses

A verdade é subjetiva, multidimensional. A certeza do eu-jogador é falsa e seu ato uma rebeldia mecânica; tomar as rédeas de si mesmo configura um esforço desesperador. Quem vê através de meus olhos? Toda decisão que tomo é consciente? O que acontece se sou apenas um passageiro do meu piloto automático, ou de alguma outra coisa (uma ideia, uma crença, uma vontade)?

Who’s Lila levanta muito mais perguntas do que se interessa em responder, ainda que não economize em revelar, das mais deliciosas formas, faceta após faceta de seu quebra cabeça recursivo. Sabe atiçar: é misteriosa, obscura, mentirosa até, porém nunca perde o engajamento, incitando a curiosidade através de um caleidoscópio de pontos de vista que mantém um retrato da realidade que é nebuloso, vivo, em constante fermentação. Pode ser que você saia um pouco diferente disso.

Killer art style and some genuinely disturbing moments.

I found the ARG stuff tiresome.

**Edit

Thinking more about this game. I really love what this is going for but one of my difficulties with taking the game on its own merits is having no idea how much game there really is.

The narrative bounties of this game are best when you are able to feast on them all and put them together. After getting like 4 endings I had no idea how long it would take to discover the rest on my own. Heading to a guide unimmersed and disinvested me from the story.

Having the Daemon be part of the game is a novel and interesting idea but ultimately I personally don't have much interest in some unknown quantity of the game being hidden from me. I know secrets and things to discover in games have been a thing forever but I guess I just would like some way to make this stuff more transparent as an option.

What a masterpiece. Wonderful art style, distinctive gameplay and a story that got under my skin.

This game has this really strange, sublime sense of horror - this fog of dread that just hangs over your every move. The surrealism of the plot is paired with a wonderful sort of weirdness and philosophical discussions which makes this experience entirely unique and addicting.

You never really get to know any of the characters. In my opinion, they were surprising, yet vague concepts that have to be explored through interpretation. I feel like this is the kind of game that everyone reads a little bit differently and that's the beauty of it.

There are various forms of death to be found in Who's Lila?
Physical death ?
Ego death ?
Author's death ?

The facial deformation mechanic might be underused from a gameplay perspective, however, it's absolutely not from a symbolic one, Who's Lila? is without a doubt one of the most focused games out there thematically speaking.

A game somewhat about social anxiety, probably about the free form of self, and, of course, about a dead girl wrapped in plastic.

A fascinating, ornately Lynchian horror art piece. The use of the repeated traversal through a single day with Stanley Parable-esque branching decision points leading to different stories and perspectives marries fantastically well to the surreal abstraction of the game's story. The ARG stuff is cute as well, although it's certainly a shame to think that this game will likely be unplayable in ten or twenty years.

My one complaint with this, which is simultaneously a nitpick and a major issue, is its use of GAN-generated "photos" for the human faces. Even if this is an intentional artistic choice, so-called "AI art" is antithetical to the practice of art as a whole and should be given no oxygen whatsoever. It would not be infeasible to take portraits yourself if you needed them, and it's a shame that this holds me back from wholeheartedly recommending this game.

For a game summarized as "A reverse-detective adventure, where you control your character's face" I thought there was gonna be a bigger emphasis on the face and the mystery and all that but.. there sadly isn't
Expressions don't matter that much and most of the endings don't involve using them. Those that do, is always during the same specific scene which I genuinely found out to be dissapointing.

Who's Lila? is a game that I was incredibly hyped for. The game is weird, charming and with an interesting gimmick + there's a Daemon! Used to give you clues and context in a cryptic way. I found that really awesome but sadly it's designed for a single ending and by itself, it doesn't add anything to the plot outside of William's room.

While the game definitely nails everything in a visual sense and knows how to make it eye catchy, the actual execution it's incredibly lacking. The story has some really interesting moments, like when you see William at the party.
The game features 16 endings but if we're talking about non repeated content that lasts more than a minute, we're talking about 5 endings at most (don't quote me on the exact amount, It's been a while since I played this). Most of the endings are usually game overs or slight alterations but you still have to go through them to get the "true" "ending".

My problem with all of this is the story. You're almost guaranteed to know the events that truly happened because almost every ending forces you to go through a 5 minute unskippable section every time and while it's cool and incredibly well done, I was so tired of seeing it over and over, specially when it turned out I didn't do it right and I got a repeated ending instead.

The story also touches some meta aspects of it which are incredibly vague. The game just gives you crumbs and adds cryptic shit for the sake of it, just to fuck around with the player and I find that incredibly dissapointing.

Overall if you're gonna play it, play it for the experience, not for the story. That way you might be pleasantly surprised or not instead of feeling dissapointment like I did.

I wasn't gonna recommend this game at first but if I'm truly honest, I love this game. I'm just dissapointed at the wasted potential in delivering a meaningful story because what we got is a video game that tries too hard to be a David Lynch media and if you like the guy and want to play smth like that then it's cool but I just wish there was more and that it didn't suck.

i make a lot of shitty mods for bad games for one specific friend i have for no reason other then i think it's really funny. i think i'm super hilarious. video games are the only thing i ever think about and so obviously i have aspirations for designing one someday, creating these mods is a good way for me to indulge in that impulse while also not letting me fool myself into putting "makes games sometimes" in my twitter bio. one time i made a house party (2017) mod that had a ton of bespoke, branching paths with unique endings based on really minute player actions and decisions. when i watched my friend play i was in agony seeing how often he had to restart the entire run because it was just impossible to create convenient save points where he could quickly branch the story to a new ending. i think who's lila suffers from this same problem most of it's playtime. you'll end up in the interrogation room for what feels like 2/3s of the endings but the path to getting there has to be meticulously played out ever so slightly differently each time. each time you finish a story you feel like you're building up to a conclusion that ultimately never arrives.
i've never played another game (or read a story or watched a movie for that matter) that parlays this kind of an anticlimax into the main themes in a really elegant way. it's not a particularly revelatory experience, and the whole Deal with the story is kinda obvious and slightly overdone in general. but it wraps itself up nice and feels like it said what it wanted to say and got out. my biggest beef with the whole package is the obsession with working in 'Lynchian' imagery and items for no reason other then this guy probably likes lost highway too much. it's good and normal to draw on your inspirations but at a certain point it dilutes the actual author's voice and style. and i'm just super sick of david lynch i have to be real. he made like one movie that i can fuck with and everything else is just so over referenced and uninteresting.

Awesome Point-and-click, Lynch-inspired horror. A reverse-detective adventure into the dark mind of an individual.

You play as William, a new kid in town who was trouble expressing emotions and making natural faces. Instead of choosing dialogue options, you shape William's face to convey a certain emotion you find appropriate for the situation. The expressions that you pick, combined with your actions, heavily affect the narrative and its endings. Which, there are 15 (16) of them. But, you don't have to get ALL of them to get some enjoyment out of it, necessarily.

The story is pretty cryptic, in a Lynchian way, so don't expect to fully understand it. Although, each ending helps unveils its themes and meanings. The subjects vary from reflections on consciousness, to even paranormal tulpas. It gets pretty meta at times, too. Really worth analyzing.

The visuals are Dither-punk style with fixed camera angles, reminiscent to the Silent Hill games. And while it looks great, it doesn't always work in the game's favor. Some paths and objects are hard to distinguish, and transitions between each angle feel a little clunky to traverse.

And while they nailed the Lynch vibe, and it mostly works, at times it really does feel a little try-hardie or tacked on. Also, I'm not a fan of the ARG side of the game. Just not my thing, personally. Encountered a few bugs, as well, with one of them not letting me progress on the endings. I did found a fix, though.

Great game overall, recommended. I'll increase the rating if the devs fix some of its bugs.

★★★ – Good ✅

Loved the 'Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk' reference too. 😌

Sometimes, not knowing is best.

Who's Lila is instantly recognizable to people who have seen even a screenshot of it due to its striking, 1-bit visuals combined with its emphasis on character faces that leads it to dedicate 40% of the screen to their portraits. For a reason, too: its main mechanic, aside from the standard point-and-click adventure toolkit, has the player manipulating the protagonist's face in order to imprint upon it an emotion to be perceived by other characters in the game.

See, William has a very hard time demonstrating emotions himself, but he tries to get by in his life. It just so happens that one of his friends, Tanya Kennedy, has disappeared, and the suspicion of foul play means that Will has a long day ahead of himself, with a lot of hard questions to answer. Multiple actors are at play, from Tanya's friends seeking her out, to the police digging around, a cult, conspiracies... and there are numerous endings to William's story depending on both the player's choices over the course of the day and their performance during conversations with others.

...and it all falls flat. As much as the face manipulation makes for a fascinating visual experience with its distorted, uncanny expressions, it's utilized somewhat poorly. This being a game with multiple endings, one would expect a focus on exploring different routes stemming from different NPC reactions, but that's not quite the case. There's few scenes in the game and even fewer occasions in which the outcome of the scene branches depending on the face William puts on, and when it does, it's almost always a matter of picking one of six correct emotions and passing the scene or not, with the game sometimes inelegantly telling the player to load the autosave because they messed up and are now stuck.

Add to that the face prompts unpredictably changing the line William is about to say, the facial expressions mechanic quickly turn into a gamified routine of trial-and-error, which only adds to the already large amount of friction inherent to playing Who's Lila. While the game's indieness is, at first, endearing, it quickly becomes irritating, with bugs, crashes and softlocks being a common sight, not to mention typos. Additionally, several questionable technical and creative decisions make it even harder to focus on the game instead of on its problems.

Who's Lila uses dithered visuals to render its scenes and presents them through fixed camera angles -- two techniques that look amazing in isolation but work against one another as they are used here. Dithering removes detail from an image (see note 1), reducing its clarity, which means it works best on high resolutions, where there's a surplus of detail, or when there's enough motion that more cues (shadows, the movement of objects relative to another) will allow a viewer to make out the picture.

As for fixed camera angles, they're not just about fixing the camera in a corner, like Who's Lila mostly does, but about employing cinematography to transmit feelings and establish a flow to the player's movement. So when using static cameras, in a scene made of low quality assets, whose game view occupies just over half the game window... well, there's a key for showing overlay icons on top of interactable objects around William, and suffice to say any player who doesn't want to object-hunt for several hours will be making extensive use of it.

Furthermore, there's an ARG element to the game. At certain points, the player is led to, on a real world browser, pore over a Twitter account, as well as visit websites from in-game URLs and download and opening PDFs that contain information needed to progress through the game. In itself, this is not terrible, since one can do all this on their phone without having to tap out of the game, but does come off as cheaply made and superfluous. What makes the ARG a pain is that part of the ARG involves installing a DLC for the game, the Daemon. That's a second executable that communicates with the main game's and triggers in-game events that wouldn't happen without it on.

It's a cute idea that ends up costing many players -- especially Steam Deck users, to which, by the way, Who's Lila is marked as Steam Deck Verified -- hours of tinkering for getting the executables to actually detect each other correctly (see note 2), and then forces playing in windowed mode so one can have both windows visible at the same time. There was no reason for it to be implemented this way other than the novelty factor, as one of the endings literally tells the player to download the Daemon, even showing the Steam Store link onscreen -- a moment in which it could have been introduced as an in-game mechanic and saved unlucky people the headache.

Mind you, this is not an optional component: a handful of endings, as well as the true ending, are impossible to achieve without the Daemon up and running. This also means that introducing the Daemon later would have also made onboarding new players much easier as they would not be immediately jumped by what, as they'll find out later, are alternate routes leading to some of the story's more obscure endings.

Friction is the keyword for Who's Lila, a game filled with interesting ideas but marred by a largely flawed execution that makes the experience as a whole harder to enjoy. In a sense, it's fitting that one of the main themes of a story is the obsession with unsolved mysteries and unknown quantities: Who's Lila seemed much more interesting from the small clips lying around the internet and the general vibes it gives off. All of that said, those ideas and vibes are here, and for those who'd like to check them out, by all means, there's far worse ways to spend money on Steam than handing it to a solo indie dev somewhere. Just be prepared for plenty of jank.

Note 1: Strictly speaking, it's not dithering that's removing detail, but the posterization step that precedes it and is required to achieve the sort of visuals seen here. In older hardware, which supported displaying less colors, dithering was employed to make it look like an image had more colors than it did -- nowadays, since computers support many more colors, to achieve that sort of retro visual, one must posterize the image first, then dither.

Note 2: A while after I finished the game, LoneEmissary and nicole.ham on the Steam Forums worked out a way to fix the game on Steam Deck (and probably any Arch-based distro) without having to mess with the system on a deeper level, so if you're an unlucky person who wishes to play Who's Lila on that platform, check their posts out.

There might be some other modern indie game trying to do what this game does, conceptually and aesthetically. Maybe for not being familiar with such games (I’m mostly playing older games) is why i found “Who’s Lila?” to be fascinating.

If you’re a sucker for games involving philosophical themes, be sure to check this game. It’s topics ranges from subjectivity, representation, time, and narrativity itself. Just like the best horror media, it’s “horror aspects” are put at service of deeper stuff.

This game features 15 different endings. Most of them can be achieved in probably just 5 minutes. Believe me, you HAVE to reach for all the 15 endings to properly experience what the game is trying to do. Anything else i say would definitely spoil the whole thing. I actually reached for 5 endings and had to pause the game for a week due to personal reasons. During that week i couldn't stop thinking about this game. When something resonates so much with you, that's probably what the best art does.

Don’t worry if you need to check on a walkthrough (which is probably the only way of achieving all the endings). It’s definitely worth it.

Sem dúvida, este é um dos jogos mais criativos e interessantes que já joguei. Desde a mecânica de comunicação por meio de expressões faciais até o próprio mistério, não há um único elemento que não tenha, no mínimo, aguçado minha curiosidade para continuar explorando.

Jogá-lo até o fim é uma experiência que realmente vale a pena, mesmo com o uso de guias e possíveis spoilers. Isso se deve ao fato de que certas mecânicas e diálogos, disponíveis em loops menos intuitivos, contribuem significativamente para a compreensão do contexto e do mistério de Lila.

No entanto, como ponto negativo, devo ressaltar que tive dificuldades para encontrar a expressão facial correta no tempo determinado pelo jogo. Por isso, acabei optando por ajustar o tempo padrão para o máximo disponível.

Enfim,

Who's Lila não consegue existir em qualquer outra mídia sem perder uma parte importante de si. É um deleite do começo ao fim cair no buraco do coelho e desvendar seus mistérios, mas também é de ressaltar como o jogo utiliza de sua não-linearidade, todas as rotas sempre te dão mais uma migalha de pão para correr atrás e a maioria dos finais criam mais dúvidas do que as respondem.

É também minha interação favorita de "use coisas fora do programa do jogo" que eu já vi, nunca liguei muito pra ARGs no geral mas tudo o que Lila oferece é engajante, bem feito e te compele a pensar em seus temas sobre a realidade do eu lírico em jogos interativos.

Meu único problema com o jogo.

Any piece of media to actually scare the shit out of me deserves credit where credit is due. It is wearing its Lynch sleeve very loud and proud (lol at the explicit Blue Velvet callout, when you hide in a closet) and it is doing it pretty well. I can't say I was ever imagining a horror game using the Mario 64 title screen mechanics to ever exist, but it is endlessly creepy. Seeing Will's face take up half the screen for basically your entire runtime pretty much always put me in a state of uneasiness, not helped by how easily you can morph his face into something grotesque. I feel as though its pho pixelated aesthetic really makes its more abstract horrors really pop out into some of the most horrifying things I've seen in a game like this. The game is taking inspiration from most of Lynch's body of work, and especially The Return, but a lot of the morphing of digitized faces really reminded me of the most chilling parts of Inland Empire. Who's Lila is is an absolute champion of art direction.

The game is pretty great, and short, so going super in depth would likely be a disservice, but I will say the game left me, very greedily, wanting a bit more from the endings. There is fifteen of them, which is a respectable amount, and I appreciate that the game leaves enough of itself open to interpretation and the ARG elements add enough texture to the worldbuilding or context to have it all make sense, but I feel like even just one more really unique scenario really could've set this game into a truly legendary space. Feel as though some of the endings you can get are just repetitive enough to feel kind of a chore to get them all, but thats me nitpicking a bit. What we got here really is great, if you're itching for something to geniunely unnerve you, this is a must. Gonna look out for this developer team's future work, they've got a keen eye for excellent scares. Thank you Jacob Geller for being one of the only big gaming Youtubers to point in the right direction for micro indies like this.

one of the only video games i loved, am giving a rating, and will never finish. i will admit, i should have quit earlier, as i continued to get a couple more endings after i had already figured the mystery out. oh well. at least i got to see the projector, that was cool.

who's lila has got to be the most interesting use of the ever-pervasive metahorror cliche. garage heathen created something i have been dying to see from more games since i played lainpsx: a mystery that you, the player, are solving, instead of some character in the story. i've always hated how mystery stories tend to have this structure:
1. setup
2. minor hints
3. dramatic detective shit
4. ending that divulges literally everything
i understand why this structure is so common. people love watching sleuths dissect crazy cases or being kept on the edge of their seats by a wild thriller. but particularly in the case of books or interactive media, this format always seemed pandering and lazy. if this is truly a mystery, set up some solid clues and let me figure it out myself! who's lila uses its meta elements to make good on the promise of a mystery-solving game. it's super tight shit and i never felt pandered to in the slightest.

however, none of this clever bullshit would mean JACK if the game wasn't interesting. luckily for us, who's lila fires on all cylinders. i lost myself in who's lila for hours. don't dismiss the visual style as some hackneyed throwback to ancient pc games; combined with the droney music and minimal sound design, it enhances your intense alienation from the characters. and damn, those are some believable characters! i replayed a couple endings just to try out the branching dialogue options, cause there isn't a single line wasted here. shoutout to the nighttime walk scene hurting my feelings.

(also, its fun and silly to drag your guy's face around while his muscles fight you. i am adding this line later cuz i realized i didn't mention the actual gameplay very much)

who's lila is short, and by design has absolutely ZERO replay value (and i say that as a firm non-believer in games needing to offer a new experience on replays to have replay value). it's still damn well worth your money. go play it already.

Scratched the exact itch I had for a neat little indie mystery/horror game with its bizarre-yet-intriguing narrative and ARG elements that strike the perfect balance between making the player go out of their way to see everything and not being too convoluted to follow.

Two complaints: one, the point-and-click controls are not nearly responsive enough to carry two entire stealth sections; and two, the game's main mechanic, that being the face-stretching feature, isn't as integral to the plot as the game's marketing would lead you to believe. The feature is totally superfluous to most of the more lore-intensive endings, which is a shame, because I think it's a really cool idea that could carry an entire game's worth of content, with or without the ARG stuff that I liked. Just food for thought.

Simplesmente incrível. Um jogo intrigante, com um mistério que nunca é revelado de forma esdrúxula na sua cara, fazendo com que você realmente se sinta investido em desvendá-lo. Além disso, o criador conseguiu pensar totalmente fora da caixa para te apresentar uma proposta única. Realmente é uma experiência que só pode ser alcançada por um jogo de PC, e nenhum console seria capaz de replicá-lo em sua integridade.

Além disso, é muito criativo com seus temas, e consegue subverter suas expectativas a todo momento. Me lembrou muito de jogos antigos que pediam para você checar algo no manual ou na caixa do jogo, mas adaptado para um cenário moderno. Só por isso, já mereceu 4 estrelas.

Esse jogo respira, vive além dos bytes que o compõe (o que é engraçado, considerando o tema dele). É uma prova cabal que desenvolvedores independentes carregam nas costas toda a criatividade da indústria de jogos, arriscando para entregar algo nunca antes experimentado e fora do comum.