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.
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.