A machine following instructions is easy to understand. The harder question begins when it starts changing because of how someone treats it. I expected the choices here to tell me what kind of protagonist I was creating. I became much more interested in what those same choices were doing to the person on the other side of the conversation. This, My Soul was created for NaNoRenO 2017 as a short science-fiction romance built around that relationship. After a routine mission ends with her ship and fellow crew members destroyed by space debris, the customizable protagonist is rescued by Silas, a laborer-class android aboard a small maintenance ship. Getting back to civilization will take three months, leaving the two of them alone together with little to interrupt the slow process of learning how the other thinks.
Silas initially approaches that situation with the practicality his role suggests. His designation is Living Artificial Synthezoid no. 51, and he was designed as an analytical, pragmatic laborer whose immediate priority is keeping the protagonist alive and healthy. He also lacks a social-sensitivity chip, which makes some of his early responses noticeably blunt. I liked that the writing did not simply introduce a handsome android and immediately treat him as a human romantic lead with a mechanical coat of paint. His differences matter to how the relationship develops.
My side of that relationship could change considerably through dialogue. The protagonist’s name is customizable, while her personality develops through the responses I choose, with room to make her stubborn, kind, witty, suspicious, flirtatious, or something between those extremes. She can also tell Silas about her occupation before the accident, which produces smaller variations later. With more than 40,000 words packed into roughly two hours, I was surprised by how frequently the game asked me to decide not simply what happened next, but what sort of person Silas was spending those three months with.
The important part is that Silas does not remain unchanged on the other end of those decisions. He reacts and develops differently depending on how the protagonist treats him, and that responsiveness became the choice system’s strongest feature for me. A warmer protagonist and a more guarded one are not merely different collections of dialogue options. They establish different relationships with the same android, which made replaying feel less like correcting answers and more like testing how much personality I had actually built into the protagonist.
That ambition occasionally works against the short runtime. There are a lot of choices for a story that can be finished in an evening, and I sometimes wanted more space between them before deciding exactly how close or distant the protagonist should feel toward Silas. The relationship has to cover considerable emotional ground within those two hours. I could feel that pressure in places, especially when a choice asked me to define feelings that I was still forming myself.
Even so, Silas kept the relationship interesting because his development never required him to stop being an android. His awkwardness, analytical thinking, and limited understanding of social behavior remain part of his personality as he learns from the protagonist. I appreciated that balance. Making him completely human in everything but appearance would have weakened the entire premise, while leaving him emotionally static would have made the relationship difficult to invest in.
Three outcomes, identified as Normal, Friendship, and Romance endings, give those choices somewhere meaningfully different to lead. I will leave their actual events alone. What mattered to me was that friendship is allowed to exist as an outcome of its own rather than functioning merely as a failed romance, while the other possibilities reflect different ways of approaching Silas during the journey. That made reaching another ending feel like the consequence of a different relationship rather than simply selecting another final answer.
The presentation is more ambitious than I expected from a free NaNoRenO project. Tarunarei created the sprites, Svarn handled the six original CGs, Sal produced the 3D-rendered backgrounds, and Minyan worked on programming, the GUI, and logo. Those different pieces give the maintenance ship enough visual identity to support a story that spends so much of its time confined to the same journey. The sprites did more for me than the CGs, but I liked having the larger illustrations punctuate a story otherwise carried by conversation.
Noyemi K composed the original music, and its restrained presence suited the isolation better than a more aggressive science-fiction score would have. With only two characters carrying most of the experience, I never wanted the soundtrack competing with their conversations. The released game does not use voice acting, leaving the prose, character art, and music to carry those exchanges instead.
Agashi wrote and directed the project, with Lunaterra and Minyan credited for proofreading, and the finished game runs in Ren’Py on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It remains free, but the amount of original material never made it feel disposable. This is still a deliberately small story about two beings trapped together for three months, and nearly everything succeeds or fails according to whether their conversations make that confinement worth following.
By the end, Silas’s capacity to learn mattered to me more than the question of whether an android can imitate human behavior convincingly. The story is interested in how repeated treatment can shape someone who was explicitly built to adapt, and putting that development partly in my hands gave the quieter exchanges more weight. I did not need him to become conveniently human for the relationship to work. I preferred watching the story ask how far connection could develop without erasing what made him different in the first place.
Verdict
This, My Soul gets more out of its human-and-android premise than its short runtime initially suggests. The dense choice system sometimes asks the relationship to develop faster than I was ready for, but letting my protagonist’s personality influence how Silas responds gives those decisions a purpose beyond steering toward romance. His analytical personality remains recognizable even as the relationship changes, and the three possible outcomes leave room for something other than romantic inevitability. The result is a compact science-fiction story whose strongest decision is refusing to treat Silas as a prize waiting for the correct dialogue options.
