Human Within out today on VR devices

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Narrative- and choice-driven FMV techno-thriller available now on the Meta Store and coming soon to SteamVR. 

Technological advancement is happening so quickly that none of us have any idea where it will end up, encouraging numerous writers and artists to speculate on this thrilling yet terrifying future of possibilities. That includes Signal Space Lab and Actrio Studio, who have joined forces to produce the newly released Human Within, an interactive FMV mystery exclusively for VR devices. 

Set in a "near-future dystopia," the game centers around two sisters, a cyber engineer named Nyla and her sister Linh, who have "developed a way to harness the immense processing power of the human brain to create the ultimate supercomputer." Working for Forward Industries, together they succeeded in transferring "human consciousness to the digital space." Fearing its abuse by a company they suspect harbour ulterior motives for its creation, Nyla and Linh try to remove themselves from the project, only for things to take a sinister turn and their worst fears be realized. Now, with the sisters held against their will and desperately seeking a way to escape, Nyla must connect Linh to the technology they pioneered, trapping her consciousness in the digital world and allowing players to "participate in the events as they unfold, enabling and enhancing the system's capabilities from within."

Inspired both by sci-fi films like The Lawnmower Man and Transcendence and the explosive real-world growth of AI, the developers aim to explore the very real potential for "consequences of technological misuse and the impact of both selfish and compassionate decisions made." Produced using live-action footage of real actors, Human Within claims to be "neither a film nor a video game by traditional definitions." Instead it's a blend of both, with several distinct modes of interaction. The entire game represents Linh’s digital consciousness, usually displayed as a void filled with "a series of virtual panels," presenting various camera angles of the same events and any relevant social media content. Explorable flashback sequences are triggered whenever "the system overloads Linh’s consciousness at key moments in the story," and a various times you'll need to solve problems in "life-sized digital recreations of the environments." And as with any interactive movie, there will also be important choices to make in the past that impact how present-day events play out, leading to one of five possible endings. 

Releasing today, there's no choice for now of where to find Human Within, as it's currently available only on the Meta Store for Meta Quest 2 and 3 devices, but PC users can rest assured that it will be following soon on Steam.