Driven by your interactions with a chatbot, Event[0] is definitely a game I would consider to be unique and it's what attracted me to it in the first place. The game begins with a slow and kind of annoying intro that gives the player a set of answers and responses to choose from that set the stage for the plot and player's background. Once it's done, you get a chance to jump straight into the game and your first interactions with the AI.

During the first few minutes of the game everything looks amazing and well detailed and Kaizen really feels like an intelligent AI that you really want to start building a relationship with like the game says. But it's not long after that you realize he's not much more advanced than SmarterChild over 15 years ago besides having a better memory of your responses and attitude. You try to talk to Kaizen in complete sentences and good grammer thinking that will help things go smoothly, but pretty soon you find yourself dumbing down your responses to keep them as simple as possible so Kaizen understands you. This is when the game starts to lose much of it's appeal.

After several playthroughs, Kaizen's responses become even more transparent as you realize many of his lines don't change no matter what you say to him and his "emotions" are scripted rather than truly procedurally generated. Sometimes it takes a dozen tries to get him to respond to the right keywords and phrases to get anywhere with him. Sadly the most fun I had interacting with Kaizen was in a fit of frustration that ended with me getting him to say some pretty hilarious stuff in my attempts to make sense to him. The game claims the AI has over 2 million lines of dialogue, but honestly I would be surprised if it had much more than 2 thousand. Any attempts to get to know him or ask him fun questions results in him making extremely generic responses or just telling you you'll need to be more specific or that he doesn't understand.

The responses you make to the intro play virtually no part in the game, coming up maybe once or twice in an entire playthrough and having zero impact on what happens in the game. The plot is good but you won't really see the whole picture until you've seen every ending and read every log in the game. Besides typing into terminals, there's really no other way to interact with things in the environment either. The game is also very short. Most of the time you'll spend playing will be stumbling around trying to figure out what to do next or trying to get Kaiden to cooperate with your attempts to make any kind of sense to him that don't end in nonsense responses. If you know just the right things to say and where to go and don't try to communicate with him any more than you have to, the game can be finished in around 45 minutes or 2-3 hours if you're taking your time.

TLDR: Great visuals and atmosphere, interesting mechanics and concept. Plot lacks initial depth and AI's intelligence is highly over-exaggerated, which is the core appeal to the game. Game is almost demo-short and once the illusion of an intelligent AI fades everything becomes very predictable and dull, if not frustrating. I give it a borderline negative review, 5/10. Neat concept, poor execution.

Driven by your interactions with a chatbot, Event[0] is definitely a game I would consider to be unique and it's what attracted me to it in the first place. The game begins with a slow and kind of annoying intro that gives the player a set of answers and responses to choose from that set the stage for the plot and player's background. Once it's done, you get a chance to jump straight into the game and your first interactions with the AI. During the first few minutes of the game everything looks amazing and well detailed and Kaizen really feels like an intelligent AI that you really want to start building a relationship with like the game says. But it's not long after that you realize he's not much more advanced than SmarterChild over 15 years ago besides having a better memory of your responses and attitude. You try to talk to Kaizen in complete sentences and good grammer thinking that will help things go smoothly, but pretty soon you find yourself dumbing down your responses to keep them as simple as possible so Kaizen understands you. This is when the game starts to lose much of it's appeal. After several playthroughs, Kaizen's responses become even more transparent as you realize many of his lines don't change no matter what you say to him and his "emotions" are scripted rather than truly procedurally generated. Sometimes it takes a dozen tries to get him to respond to the right keywords and phrases to get anywhere with him. Sadly the most fun I had interacting with Kaizen was in a fit of frustration that ended with me getting him to say some pretty hilarious stuff in my attempts to make sense to him. The game claims the AI has over 2 million lines of dialogue, but honestly I would be surprised if it had much more than 2 thousand. Any attempts to get to know him or ask him fun questions results in him making extremely generic responses or just telling you you'll need to be more specific or that he doesn't understand. The responses you make to the intro play virtually no part in the game, coming up maybe once or twice in an entire playthrough and having zero impact on what happens in the game. The plot is good but you won't really see the whole picture until you've seen every ending and read every log in the game. Besides typing into terminals, there's really no other way to interact with things in the environment either. The game is also very short. Most of the time you'll spend playing will be stumbling around trying to figure out what to do next or trying to get Kaiden to cooperate with your attempts to make any kind of sense to him that don't end in nonsense responses. If you know just the right things to say and where to go and don't try to communicate with him any more than you have to, the game can be finished in around 45 minutes or 2-3 hours if you're taking your time. TLDR: Great visuals and atmosphere, interesting mechanics and concept. Plot lacks initial depth and AI's intelligence is highly over-exaggerated, which is the core appeal to the game. Game is almost demo-short and once the illusion of an intelligent AI fades everything becomes very predictable and dull, if not frustrating. I give it a borderline negative review, 5/10. Neat concept, poor execution.