Event[0] is a very unusual game. Set in an alternate reality in which space travel is much more advanced than it is in real life, you play as an astronaut whose ship has a breakdown out near Europa. Getting into an escape pod, you are rescued by the Nautilus, an empty ship from the 1980s with a special singularity drive that allows it to travel at very high speeds – but which the AI aboard the ship claims is dangerous and must be destroyed. Everyone onboard has long since perished, but the ship’s crude AI is insistent that the singularity drive must be destroyed – and upon doing so, you will be returned to Earth.

Needless to say, this looks like a story about a murderous AI who has killed the crew of their ship – but this is anything but a standard version of such a story, and as the plot progresses, you learn more about what really happened.

The game has an unusual interface – you walk around by holding down the mouse button. This SEEMS like a bizarre interface choice – after all, WASD exists for a reason! But much of the game centers around interfacing with various terminals around the ship, using your actual keyboard. The AI is simultaneously surprisingly intelligent and not that bright, something which is actually lampshaded in the game – the logs show the previous crew members struggling with the AI’s stupidity, but it is also more clever than it seems at first glance, with a surprisingly large array of dialogue responses, if you can figure out how to get them. Being mean to it will make it upset with you and makes it less likely to cooperate with you, while being nice to it will lead to it being more polite back. It is not as sophisticated as one might hope in some respects, but I was pleasantly surprised by it at times, even as I pushed up against its limits in many cases.

The interaction with the AI and the gradual unfolding of the story are the real highlights of the game, interspersed with some simple problem solving. You might be tempted to call this a walking simulator, but it is really more of a very brief adventure game in a 3D environment.

This game was a lot more fun than I was expecting it to be. While it is a brief experience – it took me about three hours to complete, and I suspect it could be done much faster than that if you weren’t trying to look at absolutely everything and didn’t wander around in your spacesuit outside of the ship as much as I did – it actually manages to tell a brief but interesting story. Thinking of this game as a “short story” game is probably the best way to think about it – it is a small, limited environment with a limited amount of content, but it has a clear goal in mind with where it is going and it does a good job of manipulating the player, both in terms of the mystery of the game, as well as influencing the way that they treat the AI you spend the whole game interacting with.

I have to say this was well done, and if you are up for something which is more of an interactive narrative experience than an actiony video game, this might just be up your alley. Just keep in mind that this game is very short.