1000xResist Studio’s Next Indie Game Asks: Can you convince an AI that it’s not human?

If you’re upset about how much AI chatbots chat like humans, there’s an upcoming indie game with your name on it.

During the Triple-i Initiative show in early April, studio Sunset Visitor (creators of 1000xResist) presented their next title, Prove You’re Human. The narrative game puts players in the role of a human trying to convince an AI that they’re human — and with a creative team full of veteran artists, it’s going to be a lot from there.

The trailer is exciting but lacks details, which should be considered for a game that doesn’t have a release date yet. Given the indie success of Sunset Visitor’s first title about cloning and humanity, 1000xResist, expectations are high for another cerebral narrative. And as the first game under the new publishing arm of Black Tabby Games (the makers of indie hit Slay the Princess), the game raises high hopes.

In an interview with the founder of Sunset Visitor, Remy Siu, I went inside Prove You’re Human, asking an important question: What is this game? And while they aren’t releasing too many details right now or even hinting at when it will be released, we’ve talked a lot about how the science fiction game inspired by the hit TV show Severance and the rise of AI products speaks to the times we all live in — when ChatGPT chatters are succumbing to AI psychosis and AI the true scientific proselytizer. wisdom is at hand.

Prove You’re Human “is a game where an AI dares to dream that it’s human, and you’re hired to put it in its place,” Siu said. “And for you, [I mean] you, the player who has undergone surgery to divide his consciousness into two: one conscious consciousness, and then what we used to call your body, your physical body that continues to exist outside and do things.”

See what I meant about Severance?

As a program, Prove You’re Human uses these presence categories to comment on work in person versus outsiders. And as you’d expect from a group of veteran artists, there’s pageantry in this division, with your digital work (this one controlled by the player, rendered in 3D), sent periodic messages from you outside, displayed in full-motion video. (That’s the real life video we see in the trailer.)

“He’s going to make all his dreams come true, and you’re the version of you that’s stuck here doing all the work,” says Abby Howard, founder of Black Tabby Games and the new arm of Black Tabby Publishing.

“An examination of our relationship with work in the year 2026. If you work for a company now, do you who spend time in the office get to enjoy the fruits of that work?” said Tony Howard-Arias, who is also the founder of Black Tabby Games.

In another reflection of our current reality, specifically AI in sports in 2026, I asked if AI production tools were used in the development of Prove Your Human, to produce code or assets. “It’s not just about gaming,” Siu said, while lamenting that AI tools are being used in mundane things like Google search. Howard asserted that they are not involved with, or using, those tools at Black Tabby Games.

“We make a big effort to stay out of this where possible,” Howard-Arias said. “But how come your eyes don’t fall on Google’s default summary at the top of your search results?”

Engaging with AI — and choosing what’s real

As a narrative game, players will spend time in Prove You’re Human interacting with an AI, named Mesa, to convince her that she’s not human. Accordingly, there is another mechanic that players will use to interact with the world around them: raise the CAPTCHA window and select the non-realistic boxes. Through this device — again, Siu was vague to hide the details of the story — players will engage with the concept of what is true and what is not. And like other aspects of the game, there is a deep philosophy behind using the tool to declare the truth of things.

“Every CAPTCHA asks the player to do something violent. You have to choose whether or not something is something,” said Siu. “That kind of thing is not included in these conversations with artificial intelligence.”

Indie games have engaged in a slew of seemingly simple binary principles that lead to disastrous results. The iconic 2014 game Papers, We ask players to work as a low-level border patrol agent authorizing or denying entry, choosing whether to save your job at the cost of throwing people into bad habits. Prove You’re Human seems to be using CAPTCHAs to similarly challenge players to make difficult decisions.

“One of the first CAPTCHAs that Remy showed us when he was playing football was a picture of a group of soldiers with guns, and it said ‘pick all the boxes that have weapons in them,'” Howard-Arias said. “So is the context provided by an unanswerable question that puts you in a complex situation that creates some confusion.”

I pointed out that using CAPTCHAs would probably put this game out of date, and Siu agreed that ten years from now we might be using different, more sophisticated authentication tools. But he’s excited that the game will look and feel like it came out in 2026. Art is defined by the circumstances and time in which it was made, he pointed out.

“I want people who play 10 years from now, if they play this game, to understand what we were thinking at this time,” said Siu.

Why indie games are the best way to think about AI

Similar to how Prove You’re Human results from our current concerns about AI in 2026, Sunset Visitor’s first game, 1000xResist, is a product of 2020. It was developed at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic — indeed, Siu says it would not have existed without the pandemic, as their approach to the pandemic found them at the beginning of the pandemic.

Half a decade later, the world has shifted its focus to the new era of smart AI, financial inequality and labor issues. “For us at the studio, we’re always trying to make games that resonate with you in life, and are full of the world they’re made in,” said Siu.

While Prove You’re Human deals with our current reality, the AI ​​storytelling places the game in the fine tradition of science fiction and its foray into artificial intelligence. There’s tension in adding to the proud tradition of theoretical threads about intelligent entities that we might one day create while we’re alive in 2026 when it’s put into practice, Siu said.

Science fiction has many overlaps between AI, humanity and human beings concerns, from Fritz Lang’s seminal Metropolis to Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot to Severance. Siu revealed that there are things that Severance left on the table that I would like to see in this game. Although there are similarities to that show, he added that Sunset Visitor was heavily influenced by the Pantheon animated series, which deals with the consciousness uploaded to digital networks and the amount of artificial human activity.

“Games as an artistic medium almost begs questions about the nature of the self and awareness of how deeply we interact and embody character,” Howard-Arias said.

The most popular science fiction video games have been titles from major AAA developers such as the Mass Effect and Dead Space franchises, with world-building elements and story beats common to sci-fi subgenres (space opera and space horror, respectively). Prove You’re Human is a small-scale indie game with a more philosophical underpinning. Indie games have more freedom to explore themes and gameplay further than traditional ones, Siu said, allowing their developers to go the extra mile in ways that can address audiences dissatisfied with games from AAA developers.

“I think this game is, first and foremost, for an audience that is talkative minds, people who really want to see how the story plays out, without being held back by a lot of the concerns that big developers might have,” Siu said. “I hope that creates something you can’t find anywhere else.”

The first release of Sunset Visitor, 1000xResist, found an audience of gamers who engaged in it with depth and diversity to a degree that surprised Siu, hypothesizing that they would only get such attention from film fans or traditional finesse and gaming art spaces.

In developing Prove You’re Human, he had high hopes for what levels of complexity players would engage with. That desire for immersive games aligned Sunset Visitor with Black Tabby Publishing, and Siu noted the importance of having Abby and Tony, creators of the successful interactive game Slay the Princess, involved in his studio’s next game from the very early stages of development.

“The only way to inspire this kind of love of books in an audience, and the only way to grow media, is to do challenging work,” Howard-Arias said.