wait a second, who's lila again???

i like its vibe and the way the plot can be experienced in a number of ways. the uncertainty this game builds (about who the player is and what occurred before they started watching) is phenomenal, and accomplishes a really interesting feeling of alienation.

i'm going to echo the disappointment about the underutilization of the face mechanic. it's really good! it is just rarely used in a way that matters (and when it does matter, if you fuck it up the game literally tells you to reload your save... ??)

despite that, though, who's lila provides both moments of beauty and horror that really impressed me.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Really cool, really weird little game. This is a game that really benefits from you knowing as little as you possibly can before you play it, so this is the chance to click off if you're curious even though I don't really spoil anything at all in my review.

So with that out of the way here's more of my critiques/thoughts. I'm a little bummed that the face mechanic didn't feature as much as I thought it would--I somehow managed to get like 5 or 6 cards before I ever wound up in the interrogation room. There are a few endings that rely on the faces you pick, but it doesn't ever end up feeling like a "core mechanic" of the game to me in the way that the point and click or the ARG stuff does. Speaking of the ARG elements, at first I thought they were pretty cool since I like that sort of stuff but they did become a little taxing for me once I got further in the game.

I thought the dialogue/translation was a little wonky--there are lots of typos (which is ok, but it was a little jarring with the amount that there are) and the inclusion of tildes during serious/scary moments just kind of made me giggle, which is honestly a shame, because the game can really be genuinely freaky at times. The characters, apart from Lila herself, are sort of whatever--but the game really isn't about them, so it's easy to forgive it for its sort of middling writing of the cast beyond her. It's almost like the game called Who's Lila is about Lila. And it's incredible with posing that question to you and the world she lives in. It's an ode to meta mystery, shared consciousness, personality, and fiction. The visual direction of the game is awesome too!! Truly nothing like it.

The game reminds me of Paranoia Agent a lot. Cool experience, definitely recommend to people who like this sort of stuff. I'll be mulling over the hidden documents and who Lila is for quite some time. Also the Milk Inside a Bag of Milk reference did not go unnoticed, thank you!

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.

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)

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.

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.

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!