As an RPG in book form, Inhuman Resources: A Literary Machination offers to take you into a dystopian world where everyone’s life is controlled by a shadowy organisation. Perhaps your choices can offer freedom to the populace.
I like reading books, but I rarely find time to do so. When I was young and had all the time in the world, I would devour choose-your-own-adventure style books as the feeling of agency whilst reading felt like playing a game. Whilst there are a few of these to enjoy as a grown up, they’re few and far between. Thankfully there are video games that are heavily inspired by these, such as the Zero Escape series, and the glorious The House in Fata Morgana where you can influence outcomes through your choices, with the occasional puzzle thrown in from time to time. Inhuman Resources: A Literary Machination takes this approach and adds in some light RPG mechanics to open up different options whilst also giving you a fascinating world to enjoy for its duration.
You’ll create your own character, initially just by giving them a name, but your choices will cause your character to grow and change as the story progresses. You’re down on your luck, unemployed, and living in one of your aunt’s apartments. To make matters worse, your rent is two months overdue and all your job applications keep getting rejected. This is probably a realistic position for some people in modern society, and Inhuman Resources certainly plays off that idea. Lucky for you, your aunt has managed to get you an interview at SMYRNACORP, an organisation that you’ve never heard of. You head off to the interview and begin to learn that there’s a reason you haven’t heard of this company, and it’s in no way a good reason.
I’ll go very light on spoilers for the story due to Inhuman Resources being very much like a book. What I will say is that there are horror elements in this, even quite early on. It’s nothing extreme, but enjoyers of dystopian thrillers may well get a kick out of this as you dig into SMYRNACORP and its influence over modern society. You’ll be tasked with bringing it down from within somehow, but the threats within it are all too dangerous, and poor decisions will lead to a less than ideal outcome for you.
Something that I liked was that the choices you make don’t just influence the path you take, they also determine your character’s development. You have three stats, those being physical, social, and technological, and when you make certain decisions, those stats can increase. A simple example is early on, in which you’ll decide on a hobby to pursue, with each one dictating which stat will improve. These stats will in turn open up additional choices for you to utilise in specific moments in the story. If you’re social, you may be able to talk someone down, whilst picking up the Ultimate Frisbee skill — yes, that is an in-game trait — will allow you to prevent an elevator from closing from a distance. It’s a neat system that really does push you towards replaying to find out how things can play out differently.
The order you do things in will also matter because you can acquire items. On my first run I had a case where I could use a knife and I had no idea where I could have acquired one. I managed to find it later on, but if I had done things in a different order and gained it earlier, it could have wildly changed my approach to that initial scenario. I liked this a lot, as often these games don’t offer all that much in terms of replay.
I was less keen on the interface. Inhuman Resources is clearly designed to be played on PC, and using a controller on Xbox was frustrating as it’s one of those games that insists on you having a movable cursor. I’m no game designer, but I can’t imagine it’s too difficult to allow you to highlight buttons rather than slowly moving a pointer over it. Then there’s the interminably slow pace that you scroll through text using the right stick. Reading some documents took far longer than it should have done. A minor gripe maybe, but irritating nonetheless.
The story itself is very enjoyable though, with all sorts of Orwellian trappings that you might expect from a shadowy organisation overseeing the world. Be prepared for a lot of reading though, as this is very much a book first. It’s not voiced either, and you might find the weird babble that each character has a little annoying after a while. The visual presentation is very nice though. SMYRNACORP is presented as being based in an art deco building, and the artwork here leans into that. The character art is particularly lovely.
Inhuman Resources: A Literary Machination is a very enjoyable story with multiple paths and endings that fans of choose-your-own-adventure books should thoroughly enjoy. There’s a good balance of horror and mystery, with a little bit of humour mixed in for good measure, and the occasional puzzle gives a little extra challenge that some visual novels lack. This isn’t going to sway anyone who doesn’t want to read page after page of text, but someone after a digital book with some player agency could do much worse.
Inhuman Resources: A Literary Machination is available now on Xbox, PC, Playstation, Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android.
