We live in an exceptionally pessimistic time. Between climate change, governmental instability, and the increasing wealth and power of gargantuan megacorporations like Microsoft and Amazon, people are tired, scared, anxious, and looking for a solution. Likely a solution that will be offered by those very same gigantic corporations. Flat Eye, by developer Monkey Moon and publisher Raw Fury, is the tale of one of those megacorporations, trying in their own special way to save the world.
Upon booting up Flat Eye for the first time, what immediately caught my attention was a Bibliography section on the title screen. Can’t say I’ve ever played a game that has one of those before. It’s a very odd thing to have, but one that I commend the developers for. Flat Eye is a game all about technology and the effects that it has on our lives now and may have in the future, and the bibliography is full of all the articles that they used as inspiration when writing the game. They didn’t have to do this, but it’s a feature that I love, and one that I’d recommend checking out. It’s fun to browse through and see that our world may be more like the world of Flat Eye than one would care to admit.
You play as a manager of the Eyelife company, under the watchful eye of their CEO, the benevolent being also known as Eyelife, an artificial intelligence so powerful that it managed to steal the company of its creators right from under their noses. It has an important job for you. Humanity’s future is in jeopardy, and Eyelife needs your skills to determine the best viable path forward for them, namely by speaking with what Eyelife deems to be “Premium Customers,” whose personal struggles and interests Eyelife can gain valuable insights from.
The day-to-day of working at Eyelife is, thankfully, not too difficult. You have your own fancy workstation where you can check your emails, speak with your coworkers, keep tabs on all your premium customers, and swap between various wallpapers and profile pictures. The workstation customization is something that I really liked, especially the juxtaposition between the wallpapers, all rendered in that round, sanitized corporate art style, and the profile pictures that take the form of demented, AI-generated art. I just love those things, they’re very creepy, and they help convey the subtle “wrongness” of the setting.
The crux of the gameplay comes from hiring a clerk to manage your Flat Eye station, located deep within the snowy plains of Iceland. It’s a simple gas station and convenience store, though it won’t stay that way for very long. The duties of your clerk largely boil down to manning the register, fixing all of your various modules, and dealing with the Premium Customers whenever they come in.
As you fulfill Eyelife’s objectives, she deems fit to grant you access to newer, more advanced, and far more troubling equipment. You go from selling food, drinks, and gas (weirdly enough, you never get to upgrade the gas pumps) to selling gene therapy, virtual reality trips, and teleportation. Premium Customers will not enter the store until you install modules that fulfill their desires, and their stories show just how this technology can be used and misused, for good and for ill.
The game’s story is very well written and full of charm, despite the heavy subject matter the game deals with. The lore and background information is very interesting, and I like nearly all of the Premium Customers, they’re very bold and distinct with well-drawn portraits and appealing designs. I’ve also found it to be very funny at times, particularly the Eyelife AI, whose masterful performance exudes the exact sort of contempt that I’d expect from a corporate super-intelligence. She’s sadly the only character that’s voiced, but at least the one character with a voice has an amazing one.
The lack of voice acting isn’t the only thing that I take umbrage with when it comes to the Premium Customers, there’s a desperate lack of animation on them too. They don’t have any unique animations, particularly for their faces. They just stand around and keep that same dead-eyed stare forever as they stand around.
Nowhere does this feel more ill-fitting than with Lola, one of the premium customers that you’ll meet later in the game. Lola is a criminologist who wants to learn more about the minds of her subjects, so she heads to her local Flat Eye station to be installed with the memory of herself committing a brutal murder, Total Recall style. Despite the protests of your clerk, the installation proceeds anyway, and Lola reacts with terror at what she believes herself to have done. When she returns later, it’s obvious from her dialogue that the installation has made her mentally unstable, but she maintains that same blank stare and casual stance on her model at all times, something I find really immersion-breaking.
Certain premium interactions will cause Eyelife to visualize a possible future for humanity, many of them horrible, and the game very succinctly explains why they’re horrible. One of the first ones I unlocked was about using gene therapy to make humans immortal, and Eyelife deems this an unviable path because the wealthy would inevitably keep this technology for themselves, and the world would devolve into class warfare. These alternate future segments are very well thought out and interesting to explore, and they serve well at making you wish they’ll never come to pass.
One future that almost always comes to pass for AAA games, but one that I very much wish didn’t come to pass for this one, is that they launch as a buggy mess. While most of them are just minor inconveniences, it’s still obvious that this game is not ready for primetime. Clicking on modules is surprisingly unresponsive, I frequently need several clicks for it to register that I want to select something. I’ve had instances where videos played more often than needed and some quests gave me credit for completing them multiple times (not that I’m complaining about that). Using the fast-forward function seems to screw with the AI pathfinding and can result in your clerk having trouble navigating. The menu that lets you replay cutscenes is completely broken and will not play anything. More troubling is a bug where the clerk just stands there fidgeting with the air and when they do so, they refuse to accept any further commands until the day ends. Worst of all is the building menu. It seems that the game has a bug where it will sometimes place down items that I bought without it registering that they’ve been purchased, and if I try to adjust these items, the game doesn’t know what to do, and it just locks me in the build menu forever, and the only way to escape is to force quit the game.
The clerk also seems to have no idea what to do with corpses, in a statement that sounds horrifying out of context. One of the modules you unlock is a literal suicide booth, and it’s far more annoying than it is terrifying. It’s the only module that needs to be manually cleaned after each use, and the clerk keeps losing track of the corpses and dropping them on the floor, which negatively impacts your rank. I ripped out the module because I was tired of micromanaging it, and now my customers complain because they can no longer kill themselves. Classy.
Aside from the bugs, the thing I disliked most about the game is the pacing. The story progresses very slowly, largely due to the fact that you only get one premium customer per day, chosen at random as far as I can tell. Higher-grade items are locked behind completing quests, and several quests require you to fulfill certain requests from Premium Customers, and you can be left waiting for in-game weeks to complete them because the customer you need to fulfill the quest just never visits the station. If you got two premium customers a day, with the game prioritizing ones needed to fulfill quests, then I think the story would flow a lot better.
A game getting a delay weeks before launch is never a very good sign, and for Flat Eye, it doesn’t appear to have been enough. It’s not quite done, it needs to go back in the oven for a few more months. But, in some perverted way, I think it fits. One of the game’s major themes is corporate skullduggery, and what corporation hasn’t launched a product completely unfinished and lacking basic features? If you just wait for all the bugs to be squashed, you’ll get a great game with some very insightful questions to ask about the future of humanity, and one whose lessons will stick with me for a long time, if only for the fact that it taught me that hippopotamus milk exists.
Score: 7/10
Flat Eye launches today for PC and Mac via Steam. A free demo is available as well.
Related: Reviews by Devon Williams
"Videogames have been a massive part of my life since I was three. With a bottomless appreciation for games both modern and retro, I'm always happy to experience something new and wacky. I hope to become a writer someday, to craft wonderful worlds like the ones in my favorite videogames."
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