I don't know, but her game's good.
I keep running into this problem where I play a five-star banger that feels as though it was tailor-made to fit my exact tastes and desires, and then I struggle like Samson pulling down the temple to describe why it works. Who's Lila? has lingered in my Steam library for about two years now collecting dust and cobwebs, trapped in a limbo of "I'll get around to it" alongside the dozens of other games I've also never gotten around to. And, as the fucking tides roll in and the sun sets in the west, I'm going straight from posting about the maggots writhing at the bottom of the dumpster to the chorus of angels descending down in a column of golden light from on high. Sorry to keep doing this to you. I'm not trying to give you whiplash. I try to make up for the negativity by gushing over fresh titles that I love, and then find myself searching for words that won't come to tell everyone why I found them so important.
As precious as I'm being about it, though, it's not difficult to figure out why I like Who's Lila as much as I do; every individual element is something that I'm a sucker for. Dithered art style, check. Interfacing with a computer as a gameplay mechanic, check. Deep philosophical analysis contrasted against awkward party conversations, check. Plenty of ARG stuff to dig through, check. Short time loops where a single choice or facial expression can take you down one of dozens of different paths, check. Get out of my head. How did you know that I liked all of these pieces? Why did you put them all together like this? How do they all work in harmony as one, rather than as something that could simply be boiled down to its constituent parts?
Who's Lila? is not a work whose plot can be solved. You cannot make an ENDING EXPLAINED video that dictates to an audience exactly what happened when and to whom it happened to, because there simply isn't enough information given to the player for you to say with authority what went down. You're free to come to your own conclusions, and you ought to, but this isn't a piece that you can come to a full consensus on with a mass of others. There are endings, and you can get all of them if you'd like, but they're not going to unlock a true path or true ending that will make clear every element of the story. You have to interpret things. You have to experience them. You have to experiment. In an era where every indie game with any amount of ambiguity to it seems so desperate to be solvable — to be Game Theory'd —it's works like Who's Lila? that give me faith in the fact that we've still got stories you can't pass through these universal filters. We still have creators who refuse to write in the way that so many other seem keen to.
Everything surrounding the ARG elements are undeniably ephemeral — subject to the same link rot and eventual fading that's inherent to all the other ARGs long past — but art is not lesser because it's ephemeral. The band playing at your local bar aren't making "worse art" because they're playing a single live show rather than recording it in 24-bit 192kHz FLAC. Whether you can even say anything in this world isn't ephemeral due to entropy is another topic entirely, but most people tend to mean "lost within their lifetime" rather than "joining the void with all else at the end of everything" when they levy these sorts of complaints, so I'm placing my perspective within the framework of the former. I think it's fine to have threads connected to abandoned Twitter (or X, The Everything App) accounts or itch.io PDF links or Steam page DLC that'll all be gone within the next few decades because you don't need everything to get what Who's Lila? is about. It's not a completionist game. You won't get all of the answers even with the extra plot threads. Hell, they might end up raising more questions that you'll never be able to figure out. It feels strange to say, but missing out on all of this big-C Content might give you a better experience than being able to get all of it in one go; if there are parts that are missing, what can you interpret with the limited information you have? Where can you go digging to learn about what's not here outside of the game? You'll need to go on a scavenger hunt to piece these elements together again, and at that point you're committing even harder to the ARG if you're coming in at a time when it's dead and difficult to access.
What might be my favorite bit of the whole experience is when you first learn about the Daemon, which ends up being a second process that you run alongside the game that gives you hints to things you could never have found out on your own. There's something about running and installing this secondary program that feels like taking communion with it; like you've invited something into your home, and it's being useful to ensure that you keep it around. It whispers to you, groaning through static, appearing to you as an image of a clay idol with glowing eyes. It rules. I love the Daemon. I'm glad to have a little demonic buddy around to backseat me while I play.
Using AI to generate art is antithetical to the idea of being an artist; you're not creating art, but rather dictating to another what the art should look like. At that point, you're a design director instead of an artist. Garage Heathen's use of generative AI to make the character portraits in Who's Lila? has been maligned — and rightfully so — but so much has been done to the generated work that it doesn't inspire the same rancor in me. I was convinced that these were either stock photos or headshots of the developer's friends and not something churned out by generated.photos, because there's so much that's been done to them; almost every portrait in the game has been edited such that features can be dragged around and altered, with expressions twisting and every part of the face moving to accommodate sudden shifts in emotion. Teeth have been added, pupils can dilate, eyelids can shoot up, the faces arr rigged and post-processed. Artistry went into this. It's to the point where there's been so much effort spent on editing the source material that I have to wonder why AI was involved in the process at all. AI wasn't needed for any of this. Stock photos would have served the exact same purpose, and they would have dodged any controversy that would arise from their use. I feel like there's something that's trying to be said with how the faces for Lila and Tanya were photos of real people, but I don't know what it is exactly. It doesn't feel like enough, regardless, but I'm left wondering if there's some greater artistic statement being made here.
This is the type of project that's both inspiring and horrifying. I get the feeling that I could do this too, but I'm left just as paralyzed by knowing how easy it would be to fuck all of this up. The fact that the creator didn't is astounding. There are a lot of spinning plates in Who's Lila?, and none of them fall. None of them shatter. They're all wonderful and all shining, spinning forever and ever.
And major props for directly referencing The King in Yellow without being embarrassing about it. Haven't seen that since True Detective.
