Silicon and Cells

(some spoilers early, then major spoilers later)

Silicon and Cells is a cyberpunk investigation game made in Unity. You play as Jaya, a young woman intent on pulling the heist of a lifetime: She plans to break into an online casino, steal a fabulous amount of wealth, and give it away to everyone in the slums where she lives. To carry out the heist, though, she needs a body modification. And this is where we see the first of several themes featured in Silicon and Cells: a bionic or a psionic modification? Will she (you, the player) choose a mechanical enhancement or a flesh-based one?

Regardless of which modification you choose, though, Jaya’s heist goes awry, and it does so in a way that makes her suspect that she’s been set up. Most of the rest of the game entails her investigation into what really happened. In the process she uncovers some deep secrets about her civilization and its government. By the end she (you, the player), will have to decide what to do about everything she’s learned.

Gameplay-wise, Silicon and Cells does some interesting things. First are the body modifications. In addition to your initial choice, there are other enhancements you can gain over the course of the game as well. These affect the way you interact with the game world; having different modifications active may mean that you’ve become better at persuading people or that you’re able to perceive certain things you wouldn’t otherwise. To make them work properly, though, you have to distribute power manually among them. This becomes a major puzzle mechanic: Which modifications should you activate in which situations?

A second interesting gameplay feature is that your investigation happens both in cyberspace and offline (“meatspace,” in the game’s parlance). Your discoveries in cyberspace affect those in meatspace and vice versa, and so you must continually move back and forth between the two, thinking about how your actions in each might affect the other.

Thematically, there’s a lot going on with Silicon and Cells, although the dominant theme is the relationship between humans and technology. For one, Jaya must acquire multiple enhancements in order to complete her investigation. In addition, over the course of the game Jaya talks with a variety of people for whom technology has a vastly different role in their lives, from a character who has very little use for it to a character that has basically merged with cyberspace, as well as several in between. These are mostly presented neutrally, with the player allowed to see advantages and disadvantages of each.

There are several other themes explored in Silicon and Cells as well. For example, wealth disparity, religion, and government’s role in providing security vs. freedom all arise. The game’s treatment of these are all interesting, but by the end I felt like the game was trying to do too much, with the result that not only did it not explore any of these themes as deeply as it could have, it missed some obvious opportunities for said exploration. For instance, the gap between rich and poor is strong in the early parts of the game; it’s Jaya’s motivation for the heist in the first place. But later Jaya comes into possession of a fortune. It seems like she could take that money back to the slums and distribute it like she originally intended. However, the game apparently ignores this possibility. Sure, by that point Jaya’s preoccupied with her investigation, but it still seems like the game should allow for some nod in the direction of Jaya’s original intentions. However, since there’s so much there players can use Silicon and Cells as a sort of inkblot test: They can pick out the issues they’re most interested in and spend their time dwelling on the ways in which the game addresses them.

For me, the game’s multiple endings were among the most interesting parts. I found two of nine endings, and they were quite different. (Major spoilers coming up!) One resulted in nearly everyone in the civilization wanting to spend their time playing VR games and virtually ignoring meatspace life, to the detriment of the latter. The other involved Jaya killing the malignant cyberGod and ascending to the rule of the city. Rather than this being a victorious win state, though, Silicon and Cells has a more interesting end for Jaya. The burdens of leading her civilization turn out to be too much for her. The final scene finds her alone, crying for comfort and release from her responsibilities and begging for forgiveness from the God that she’s killed—forgiveness that of course can never come. Now that’s an ending!

I’m curious what some of the other endings are, but that leads to a critique of one of the technical aspects of Silicon and Cells. There’s no way to save your game, and in some places there’s no way even to pause it. I take notes when I’m playing IFComp games, and that means I’m sometimes switching away from the game to jot down my thoughts. There was a climactic battle near the end of Silicon and Cells that I lost before I even realized the battle was in real time and I needed to slow down the scrolling. Then, when I navigated back to that part of the game to retry the battle, I found myself stuck with no options to proceed and no way to restore. At that point, with two hours into the game and so close to the end, I almost rage quit. However, I decided to give the game one more chance: I restarted and played it through from the beginning. (In retrospect, I might have instead been able to reallocate the energy on my modifications to produce some new options.) Restarting, though, led me to a pleasant discovery: Without all the exploring and just focusing on the main puzzles, it took less than 10 minutes to return to that battle from the beginning of the game. This time, I was ready for it.

Another minor critique has to do with the game’s ASCII cover art, which also appears in the navigation page for the game’s cyberspace locations. Not only does it look a bit technologically unsophisticated for the game’s themes, the color contrast is rather jarring.

Overall, Silicon and Cells is a thematically rich cyber-investigation game that is quite fun to play. I think it does try to do too much with its themes, with the result that it feels broad rather than deep when it comes to most of the issues it raises. But its various commentaries, particularly on humanity’s relationship to technology, are certainly worth considering. Gameplay is interesting, giving the PC a mix of different body modifications and game modes to explore, as well as an investigation whose stakes rise higher and higher the more you uncover. With its nine different endings, the game has replay value as well. While I would like to see it have a save option and a pause option, the enjoyable parts of the game easily outweigh the areas in which it could be improved. I certainly had a good time with Silicon and Cells.