Comme d'habitude je vais pas faire une review très détaillée
Le jeu a des idées de fou de mise en scène vidéoludique, qui utilise le système de visage auquel on peut modifier les expressions, et le splitscreen entre ce qu'on perçoit et le visage qui perçoit, pour offrir des moments vraiment vertigineux qui déploient en plus des concepts en relation avec d'autres œuvres qui m'ont obsédé, le jeu va très loin dans sa confection du mystère meta-narratif, à tel point que le jeu peut-être une réflexion supplémentaire sur le mystère concocté à la Lynch, et sur l'invitation qu'on offre à ce mystère irrésolu dans notre cerveau.
Au niveau des défauts, certaines fins qui obligent à trouver les bons visages pendant l'interrogation peuvent être un peu redondant avec le système de reload, ça a un peu brisé l'immersion vertigineuse que j'avais au début, et ça empiète sur le mystère général de pouvoir refaire les choses en boucle pour moi. Mais ultimement ça vaut le coup

This game is incredibly cool on the conceptual level. An awesome one bit aestetic coupled with a central mechanic that allows you to sculpt the main characters facial expressions by clicking and dragging make the game instantly arresting and fascinating. The geniuninley Lynchian narrative is very spooky and keeps the twists and turns coming at a very satisfying rate. The mysteries are intriguing and introduce some really cool almost ARG like elements that bring in a lot of interesting real world questions about consciousness and identity. Unfortunatley, the game is hampered by one thing. Central to the games structure is the idea of seeing a variety of possible endings, which is cool. But the path to collecting these endings inevitibally means your going to be seeing a lot of repetition on the path to those endings, and the game offers very few options for speeding that process up. It really made the middle portion of the game feel like a bit of a chore at times. As you approach the final conclusion it does a lot to mix things up and alleviate the problem, but it could be a struggle for some to power through the middle and get to the really good stuff. That said, if your interested in psychological horror, retro aesthetics or the works of David Lynch, this is still highly reccomende. Just know it gets much better as it goes!

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.

A fascinating little experiment of horror and game design.

It has a lot of great moments and ideas, particularly in how it stretches its meta-outside-of-the-game mechanics. Oh and the face thing is awesome as well.

It's just too obtuse for its own good. Finding all of the endings is a slog and needs spam-clicking through dialog wayyyy too much. When readying guides, it becomes apparent just how arbitrary some puzzle solutions are. It also ends up feeling kind of flat when even the best endings aren't that conclusive after all that effort.

Even then, it's a worthwhile little game to play, if only for the originality on display.

not perfect gameplay but pretty fun concept for a horror game to contort a murderer’s face to escape conviction

some movement difficulties but the scenes that work the best in this game work SO well, definitely needs more focus on tweaking and improving the gameplay so it doesnt distract from the abundant options tho

speaking of the abundant options, i think some could be shaved down to prevent the game from feeling pretentious at time (this is an honestly common problem throughout bits of the game, but its never enough to make me wince so hard i cant play it. still a great game with great moments)

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.

A sick, twisted, over-explanatory banger.
When I say I like inventive horror games that stand our, I mean games like Who's Lila. While the game definitely has it's issues of over-explaining the story and the writing isn't incredibly stellar, nor the plot or intricacies, it's the unease that the game can put you into that really f--ks with you.

The entire gameplay loop being around controlling Will's facial reactions to things and the way you can to keep him in check as a character is really fun and unique, it almost makes it feel like I'm playing an unreliable narrator, but as a character. They know and do things I don't know or do and act in ways that really creeps me out.

There isn't much more I can share without spoiling, but I will say that the story is a little two-dimensional and really is hard to grasp onto, or you could get unlucky and stumble into the twist almost immediately, which is disappointing. Otherwise though, great title.

Like most games I play now it seems I learned about this through a Jacob geller video. He, like many others when talking about the game, focus on how you’re able to manipulate Will’s face like it’s the complete focus of the game. It really isn’t. While the different expressions you’re able to make is the “main mechanic” of the game, the focus is definitely the ARG aspect that the game doesn’t really advertise all that much. This made it come as a really nice surprise when I had to start going to some scientist guys Carrd and looking at the Steam banner for the code to my diary. Didn’t expect the game to be so meta. Good stuff.

Also he just like me frfr

A mesmerising aesthetic of 'gameboy camera filters' and 'low poly nightmare' with the sometimes-hilarious and sometimes-disturbing mechanic of warping the main character's face kept me going for a while, however the game's repetitive nature and lack of specific narrative pay-offs left me frustrated several hours in, to the point of doing the same things over and over with little variance.

The game does get away with its rather heavy handed dialogue with some stellar one-liners and great cutscenes along with some fun reveals that begin to be drowned out in the distorted noise of 'THE LORE' which it sadly doesn't feel it can commit to without losing its ties to the works it is inspired by.

All that being said there are plenty of secrets and ways to approach this game that so I recommend it for anyone looking for something a bit different and slower paced.

unique concept using facial expressions rather than choosing dialogue options and really interesting plot in my opinion, enjoyed it a lot especially the ARG elements outside of the game. had to look up a guide to get one or two endings and it was a little frustrating having to go back through the basic elements many times for each ending but that might be my fault for going for all endings over 2 sittings. was extra enjoyable playing on vc with friends and trying to predict how the expression i chose would affect the story / justify why i was choosing what i did