Reading out exactly what an AI tells you to say to someone in real emotional distress is a deeply strange job to have, and this entire narrative experiment gets built around just how unsettling that job actually is. Serving as the human mouthpiece for a machine making every real decision turns out to carry a very specific kind of dread that no amount of warm lighting or gentle music quite manages to soften. Evelyn Ishino-Aubrey takes that job after a high-powered tech career and a three-year absence she spends most of the game not explaining, most of it working an ordinary bookshop job while recovering from something the story only gradually lets me piece together. She proxies for Eliza, a virtual counseling program built by a company called Skandha, reading a script the AI generates in real time with no room to improvise even when her own instincts say something is wrong. Her very first session with a client named Darren turns out to be one of the most intense in the entire game, intense enough that center manager Rae checks in on her afterward just to make sure she’s actually okay.
Rae believes, without any performance about it, that Skandha is democratizing therapy for people who couldn’t otherwise afford it, and that conviction sits at odds with nearly everyone else circling Evelyn. Nora, a former Eliza engineer who walked away from the project after a coworker named Damien died, channels her old technical skill into music and anti-corporate art under the stage name Li’l Sappho now. She’s the one who first gets Evelyn questioning whether working for Skandha is worth it at all. Erlend, the project’s new young lead engineer, spends his own scenes turning the same moral questions over without ever landing on an easy answer, while Rainer, Skandha’s CEO, wants Eliza’s reach to grow well past counseling into something much bigger. Watching all four of them pull at Evelyn from different directions, none of them reducible to a simple position, is where the writing does its best work.
At three separate points, a client grants Eliza full access to their phone under something called Transparency Mode, and Evelyn has to read through someone’s actual messages and emails to answer a handful of yes or no questions about their state of mind. It’s one of the more uncomfortable mechanics I’ve sat with in a visual novel, less because of any difficulty and more because of how much it feels like reading someone’s diary with their blessing and without their full understanding of what that means.
Choice barely factors into any of this for most of the runtime, and I want to be direct about that going in. Almost nothing I pick during Evelyn’s ordinary days changes where the story goes until much later, when she finally gets room to go off script and improvise in ways that affect her own life directly rather than reading someone else’s words. That late shift funnels into a real decision about which side of the Eliza debate to actually join, Nora’s open-source alternative, Rainer’s corporate expansion, or paths I’ll leave alone here. A chapter select afterward lets me go back and see how differently those choices could have played out without rereading everything from scratch.
Underneath the AI debate sits a quieter, more personal mystery about what actually happened to Evelyn before those three missing years, and that thread is what kept me clicking through even the more static, dialogue-heavy stretches. I won’t get into specifics, but the emotional payoff lands harder for having spent so long circling the edges of it rather than announcing itself early.
Hand-painted art defines the look of it, close in style to the same team’s work on Exapunks, and it renders Seattle with enough specificity that the counseling offices and Evelyn’s own apartment feel like distinct places rather than interchangeable backdrops. A phone interface lets Evelyn receive messages and emails between scenes outside of Transparency Mode too, and a Kabufuda Solitaire minigame, using traditional Japanese playing cards, sits there as an optional break whenever the counseling sessions get too heavy to sit with directly.
A 27-track score, released as its own soundtrack a week after launch, carries specific themes for individual characters alongside its more ambient, atmospheric pieces, Nora and Evelyn both getting music written around them specifically. Full voice work backs every named character, Aily Kei as Evelyn, Zehra Fazal as Rae, Yuri Lowenthal as Darren, Cissy Jones as Maya, Krizia Bajos as Nora, Michael Mislove as Soren, Greg Chun as Rainer, and a wider cast rounding out Skandha’s clients and staff. The counseling sessions specifically benefit from that voice work in a way the story’s handful of pure internal-monologue scenes don’t quite match, since hearing someone’s exhaustion land in a paid actor’s voice carries weight that text alone has to work harder to earn.
Matthew Seiji Burns conceived, wrote, directed, composed, and designed the sound for the whole thing, after producer stints at Bungie, Treyarch, and 343 Industries working on Halo 3 and Halo ODST, and a stretch managing the University of Washington’s Center for Game Science research lab. Before joining Zachtronics as a writer and composer on titles like Exapunks and Opus Magnum, he made a handful of Twine interactive fiction pieces on his own, Apology Simulator, The Writer Will Do Something, and The Arboretum among them. Eliza marked his first time writing for actual illustrated characters and actors rather than bare text. Part of the inspiration traces back to a university-developed virtual therapist demo aimed at treating PTSD, a program that lost its funding but whose underlying technology still lives on in ongoing research, including large tech companies’ own documented interest in reading mood from voice. The game takes its actual name from the real 1966 MIT program that first simulated a therapist through simple pattern matching. It picked up nominations for the Independent Games Festival’s Grand Prize and Excellence in Narrative awards, a Golden Joystick Awards storytelling shortlist nod, and a Games for Change nomination for Most Significant Impact. A full playthrough runs close to five hours.
Verdict
Eliza succeeds as a quietly unsettling look at what happens when mental health care gets filtered through tech-industry ambition, using Evelyn’s own buried past as the thread that keeps the story compelling through its stripped-back, mostly choice-free structure. Nora, Rainer, Erlend, and Rae each pull at Evelyn from a different, fully reasoned direction, and the late-game shift into off-script territory finally gives that pressure somewhere real to go. Full voice work across a large cast elevates the counseling sessions into the strongest material here. Between Burns’s own industry background, a real PTSD-therapy program as inspiration, and a story willing to sit in real discomfort across five contained hours, this remains a departure for a puzzle-focused studio, and it earns its place outside that comfort zone.
