Invasive Species by Rachel Helps and Steven L. Peck
About 6 months ago my boss (of all people) sent me a link to a website explaining how AI was surely about to kill us all within the next year or two. My reaction was “um excuse me what??” and a lot of anxiety. Knowledge is [usually] my best anxiety-reliever so I set myself to learning more, which led me to sign up for an online course with weekly readings, writing assignments and virtual socratic discussions about [supposedly] impending AGI and AI safety. The first week of the course laid out a lot of readings meant to give you a positive vision of AI. I think the intention was to help you solidify why we do need AI after all so that we can focus on fixing it, rather than throwing it all out the window and committing to being luddites. One of these readings was Machines of Loving Grace, an essay by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, that describes his grand vision for what we stand to gain from AI. This essay did the opposite of pump me up about AI. I thought it was harrowing and borderline eugenics-coded. In the essay, Amodei discusses how yes, improved AI can maybe cure cancer and solve other tricky medical issues, but also, we will be able to relieve people of psychiatric illnesses like depression and ADHD. It’ll be controversial, sure, but we’ll get over it! Also: people are going to live to 300. Won’t that be swell?? Uhhhh…my mind boggles at how many software issues will arise when you knock a core assumption about human biology out of the window (imagine the birthdate picker debacles!) but also how social security and the labor force distribution will completely collapse. We are totally unprepared. And let’s not even get into the glossing over of “controversy” or the likely inequitable distribution of these kinds of medical care.
Oh wait, that is what Invasive Species does. This is a game where you play the grandmother to and primary caretaker of an autistic child while his parents are busy running a gene modification company, powered by and in partnership with an alien race. They decide it is good PR to have him go through the procedure that they are selling to try to get rid of his developmental limitations and to prove it is safe. He is 8 years old and non-verbal, and only a hundred or so people have done the procedure so far, by the way. So it starts out pretty heinous. Then of course you discover the procedure, called Uplift, may not be all roses (shocker).
Where the writing is light on emotional and character detail, you may end up like me, and fill in the blanks with your own feelings about the real world counterparts of the game. I was reminded of the “AI will be our medical salvation but might kill us all” discourse, but also of GLP-1s and the sticky American relationships with fatness and ableism. It reminded me of how disconcerting it is to go a few months without seeing a friend or relative, who for years or decades had more or less the same appearance, to then reconnect with them and realize their body has completely transformed in just a short time. Or how after years of body positivity and activism, everyone is running the opposite direction. Forget accepting a range of body sizes: we all need to be as thin as we can get. When I try to describe this feeling, I say it is like I’m standing outside a building and looking in at the rest of the world through a window. Isolating. Confusing. Strange. Invasive Species, by way of themes, stirred these feelings in me.
It’s interesting to observe how, even in game, I can’t bring myself to cooperate. You are given the option to undergo Uplift, complete with a checklist of desirable traits like having superhuman memory, liking the taste of vegetables more, not needing a lot of sleep, suddenly loving exercise, and so on. You can also change your height, your weight, and your skin color. Nope nope nopity nope! I am a white American woman who has seen too many blackface scandals unfold in the media. Not even in IF my friends! But there was something more deeply triggering about dragging my finger back and forth across the weight picker. What would it do to my brain, to acknowledge wanting a different body? Even just in a game, it feels like an insidious proposition. It is a slippery slope toward the cloud of body dysmorphia, and I don’t need any extra nudges. In the end, I left every setting alone, and opted out of the procedure entirely. Plus when you read the agreement, you’ll realize that you have to serve as a physical host and then raise an alien baby?!? Absolutely NO THANK YOU. It’s hard to see what a woman old enough to be a grandmother stands to gain from any of that.
The game is incomplete in its submitted form. It ends on Act 2 on a big cliffhanger, which is frustrating. I tried out 3 of 4 potential endings, but they don’t seem to mean much without the third act, as they all funnel to more or less the same cliffhanger. My biggest writing/logistical complaint is that I opted out of all procedures, choosing to only go to the Uplift apartments as a guardian for my grandson, but there were still peppered references indicating my body felt new and different or that I had a buglet (baby alien) of my own. These never became relevant to the story, so I assume they slipped in from text that overlaps with other story paths. Further play testing and editing might help.
Another point of critique is that I think it is a bit odd that your character fails to react to the reveal of terrible information at different moments. At one point you read an exposé on what really happens during the procedure. Your grandchild is on the precipice of undergoing the same thing and there is literally no option to call his mother and scream “don’t do it!!” You just kind of shrug along and accept it. What kind of relationship do you have with your daughter anyway, to not try and assert your grandson’s well being over something as serious as basically death?? It is a little disconcerting. At the same time, this hollowness presents its own horror. I think even more chilling is a bonobo you meet that has undergone the procedure. You eventually develop a friendship with this character, and their behavior is foreign in a way that makes sense with their background, but also feels deeply uncanny and unsettling.
As for design choices: The interface is competently made. I especially like the slick menu button at the bottom of the screen, which features an alien icon and opens up a dial of menu choices. But my favorite is that you can opt in to have choices explained with helper text, which felt revelatory to me. I think it can be challenging in choice based games to not know when a choice is mostly irrelevant (see 1 of 2 slightly different paragraphs, but you’ll still arrive at the same narrative outcome), or extremely meaningful (one choice could alter the entire ending). This game just…tells you. Which I loved. It made me feel more empowered. Instead of having to guess, I could really think about: How much do I trust this company? What will my daughter think? Could this affect my grandson? Do I want to go on a little side adventure, or just move the story along? I really liked that experience.
I would definitely revisit this after a full release, I’m pretty invested to see how it turns out.