The term "guilty pleasure" has kind of become a dirty term in the past decade, hasn't it?  A guilty pleasure is a piece of media that you adore despite knowing it is of dubious quality.  It is looking at something, understanding it's bad, and choosing to love it anyways.  It was, once upon a time, a very common term to throw around.  It has always exist, of course, people have always been viewing media that they know is bad but still love anyways.  However, it definitely became incredibly commonplace after the advent of the online space.  In the late 00s/early 2010s, there was a lot of talk of media being "good" or "bad" inherently, we had a new breed of critics with very on the ground, grassroots perspectives that focused primarily on explaining why things, particularly things from their/your childhood, were terrible.  In the face of such overwhelming criticism, it became common to cling to the stuff from your childhood, acknowledging that it might be bad but that it's still fun or still charming.  It became your "guilty pleasure".

But as time went on, this entire ideology fell to the wayside.  The more cynical critics of the early online space fell out of favor, both due to personal controversies and a reevaluation of their critical stylings.  Many critics, no longer bound by brands that often forced them to develop identical styles and voices, began to free themselves from their shackles and find their own space in this world.  And also Linkara was there, making the same awful content he always had and getting way too defensive when anyone criticized his low budget internet show that hasn't evolved at all in two decades where he gives bad opinions about comics.  We were, strangely, somehow entering a world where people were more critical and less critical than ever.  The rise of the video essay was occurring, which tended to focus less on berating media and more on trying to figure out what does and does not work about them.  We strived for a more tolerant society, even as tolerance itself became kind of a sticking point.  And the idea that things cannot truly be good or bad began to take root.  People scoffed at the idea that something might just not actually work, countering with some flavor of "well people like it, let them enjoy it".  Films that had been universally seen as bad were now getting defenders, not because of the film's actual quality but because of the fact that people enjoyed it.  In the midst of this, the term "guilty pleasure" started to seem outdated.  After all, why should someone feel guilty for liking something?  It's just their opinion.

I have never liked the abandonment of guilty pleasure as a term.  My opinion is that, genuinely speaking, it is rather healthy to acknowledge when something is not good but you still enjoy it in spite of that fact.  I earnestly believe that it has been harmful to people's perceptions of things to allow them to openly adopt the stance of "I like it so it's inherently good".  I think in our quest for tolerance and acceptance of all viewpoints, we have incidentally bred a very selfish and self-serving relationship with media, something I have talked about at length on this blog before.  I think that understanding that something is bad for xyz reason, if anything, allows you to appreciate the things you love about it.  So often we assume everything exists on a binary of right and wrong and that something being bad means it's wrong to like it.  As such, I want to talk about one of the greatest guilty pleasures in my life, an ambitious, misguided, wonderful work of art that could only happen in an era where the advancement of technology created a place for creativity that said technology could not hope to accomplish.  Today, my friends, we're talking about...

Lifeline: Voice Action Adventure - The Best Worst Best Horror Game You'll Never Play

What Exactly IS Lifeline?

Lifeline: Voice Action Adventure is a 2003 survival horror game released for the PlayStation 2.  Taking advantage of the massive technological leap between the PS2 and its predecessors, as well as the advent of microphone based games, Lifeline attempts to bring the potential of a microphone game into a place where it can be used for a proper "gaming" experience.  Microphone based games had existed before this, obviously, but previously they were pretty casual affairs.  The Nintendo 64's Hey You! Pikachu, a pet simulator where you go on adventures with the eponymous electric rodent and the Dreamcast's Seaman, a bizarre life simulator where you raise a fish with a human face to adulthood all the while it talks philosophy with you.  Lifeline was among a small wave of games in the sixth generation of game consoles that attempted to use this technology to create more traditional gaming experiences, which eventually lead to the GOAT Odama, shoutouts to the Odama speedrunning world champion.

In Lifeline, you play as a character known only as the Operator.  Set during Christmas of 2029, the Operator and his girlfriend, Naomi, were visiting a Space Station hotel that orbits the planet Earth, part of a series of extraterrestrial vacation spots from a Japanese space travel company.  The hotel is both a hotel and an active research station, and in the midst of the Christmas party being held on the station, an experiment goes off attracting aliens to the hotel and separating the operator from his girlfriend.  Getting injured in his attempts to run away from the aliens, the operator seals himself within the station's security office, unable to move but being completely safe, to await rescue.  However, there's obviously two problems: one, if help does arrive, how will they know where the operator is, and b, he still has no idea where his girlfriend is.  Being trapped within the security office, he immediately begins searching throughout the station for any sign of other survivors.

This leads him to the station's "brig", wherein one of the station's cocktail waitresses is locked inside, having been suspected of being a stowaway.  This is Rio, one of the only survivors of the invasion and the only one that the Operator can find.  Rio is, unsurprisingly, a suspicious person.  We find her locked in the brig, she keeps a lot of secrets to herself, often dodging or deflecting questions about her past and why she was imprisoned in the first place, and it's clear she has some grander purpose that she is not telling us.  Nevertheless, you two quickly strike a deal: you are in the security wing of the station, which is where the evacuation pods are.  Rio has to head your way anyways if she wants to get off this ruined space station.  If you free her, and help guide her to your location using the security feeds, she will help you find your girlfriend and free you from the security room, at which point the three of you will get off this ship together.  Opening the jail cell, Rio steps out, and your adventure begins in earnest.

This is where the core gameplay of Lifeline comes in.  While Lifeline is a survival horror game in the style of Resident Evil where you must manage resources, heal yourself regularly, solve puzzles and so on, Lifeline is really more akin to a point and click adventure game.  Rio does not move autonomously, nor do you control her directly in any way.  You, as the operator, are responsible for telling Rio where to go, what to do, where to shoot, where to investigate, and so on and so on.  You must look around the area, scan for suspicious or interactable parts of the map, and then tell Rio to go there or look at that.  Along the way you will pick up new commands for Rio, allowing the player to interact with her more in-depth or more naturally, and often allowing Rio certain advantages, i.e. giving her AI an auto-function which will start off very clueless but evolve over the course of the game so you don't have to constantly micromanage her.

This gameplay is where the "Voice" part of Lifeline comes in.  Rather than simply clicking on the area and telling Rio "go here", you have to vocally guide her.  This is the core function of the game, you are always in conversation with Rio and she reacts to what you say or do.  It's made to feel like a partnership, she is on the ground trying to fight her way through this nightmare scenario while you have access to all the camera feeds and are trying to guide her to safety.  As previously stated, the intention is that as you go along and guide Rio, she will become more confident and independent.  Her character is even described as having "quick reflexes but poor decision making skills", meaning that while she is quick to respond to commands, she has trouble deciding.  And as you go along, she is meant to gain confidence in her own abilities, and the player will be given the option to trust in her judgement, let her move on her own.

Rio will also begin to open up more and more as you move on.  The player and Rio are meant to form a bond as you progress through the game, feeling more and more like partners.  It's shockingly immersive at times, giving you these quiet moments where you can just talk to her and find out more about her.  Discover the actual reasons why she came to this space station, what she actually knows of its operation.  As you go on, the story twists and turns, every revelation shaking the foundation of the world you knew.  The closer you get to escape, the more unlikely that escape ever coming seems to be.  Will you ever find your girlfriend?  Will you ever be saved from this horrifying encounter?  It's up to how you guide Rio.  This unique relationship between the two parties, the player and the game, makes Lifeline one of the most interesting works of art within gaming history.  A true blend of creativity and technology.  There's just, you know, one big problem...

Nothing About Lifeline Actually Works

If you know of Lifeline, you probably know it through someone else playing it.  It's very likely the reason you've heard of this game is through VTuber and immunodeficiency activist Ironmouse's disastrous playthrough of the game, wherein she got so frustrated that she had to adopt a whole new voice in order to finish the game.  If not her, though, it is probably through another YouTuber or Twitch streamer who is playing this game in order to gawk at the oddness of it.  They may commit to a full playthrough or, more likely, just play the game until it stops being "fun" which is roughly the first enemy encounter and then go "wasn't that weird, y'all".  Indeed, this is how I first got introduced to the game, actually.  Long ago, in the early days of livestreaming, a content creator I watched at the time played through Lifeline and, as is the typical reaction, proceeded to mock and berate the game.  This is entirely fair.  Lifeline is an absolute disaster.

Technological Hurdles

Lifeline is incredibly ambitious.  Attempting to create a fully interactive entirely voice controlled video game for the PlayStation 2, at a time where we had just barely begun to expand the technological limitations of video gaming, was admirable.  Like I said before, only a few years before Lifeline, voice controlled gaming was the domain of pet simulators.  No one had ever truly tried a game this in-depth before, a game this close to being a hardcore title, a game that, should it succeed, could revolutionize gaming.  It was, as you could imagine, an absolute disaster to program.  The game was very close to being cancelled at various points and was basically saved by sentimentality.  To quote an interview with the game's director of game design, Manabu Nishizawa, on the game's official site:

We made two prototypes of this game. We made it on a PC, not a PS2. We made the prototype to see if it was possible to "control a character by giving instructions using voice recognition." Three months after starting the prototype, a brown-haired girl wearing a black sleeveless top, culottes, and boots, holding a gun, stood on the PC screen. Hesitantly, I pressed the spacebar on the keyboard and spoke into the microphone, "Walk." The moment I released the key, I got goosebumps all over my body... I was truly surprised. Along with the subtitle "Yes" appearing at the bottom of the screen, the girl began to walk with a tap-tap. Still excited, I instructed her to "Stop," and she stopped instantly. "Walk" (tap-tap) "Stop" (stop) "Walk" (tap-tap) "Stop" (stop) "Walk" (tap-tap)... We repeated the test so many times that it was hard to tell which was the machine and which was the robot. I felt like I was experiencing the future. Looking back now, I think that if I hadn't had that moment of awe, Operator's Side would never have been completed.

 One of the key problems that the game faces is the voice recognition software itself.  It works okay in the most ideal conditions possible, in a room without too much white noise, with a speaker speaking very clearly, in an accent that the game is trained to understand.  The moment you deviate from those conditions, however, the recognition goes down the drain.  To bring it back to Ironmouse's playthrough, Ironmouse is Puerto Rican, and as such has a specific way of speaking.  She has a very thick accent and naturally talks with an exuberant energy to her.  The game is literally not trained to understand the nuances of her English, which famously caused her to have to adopt a very clear, slow talking American accent to push through the game.

The biggest surprise, though, is not that the game doesn't understand more specific accents from parts of the world the game was not really released in.  No, it's that the game struggles with accents that it's definitely meant to be programmed for.  My dear friend Thomas, friend of the blog, zine master extraordinaire, played Lifeline back in 2020 after getting on a voice-controlled game kick in the wake of his playthrough of Odama.  And, while Thomas didn't struggle to get the game to understand him nearly as bad as Ironmouse did, he did struggle to get the game to understand him a great deal.  So much so that some of his clarified speech for Rio's understanding became a meme, an older post I was writing about Lifeline was named "In Her Mouth" after the way he had to pronounce "Inner Mouth" to get Rio to understand him.  Thomas is from South Carolina initially, and does not have a particularly thick accent.  It seemed, genuinely, like Rio only has a decent time understanding you if you have literally no accent at all, i.e. are part of the Mid-Atlantic "no real accent" group.  And even then, like, I've seen people play this game from that group as well, it's still basically a nightmare.

Not that any of this matters anyways, as the AI in the game is also, famously, terrible.  Rio has been criticized by the majority of people who have played this game as being kind of a complete and total idiot.  Rio is not only difficult to communicate with, but difficult to work with.  She will completely ignore your instructions often just because her AI has difficulty finding the place you want to go or, barring that, just doesn't know how to actually access the information you need her to access.  She struggles with the most basic tasks often, seemingly completely unable to do anything on her own.  The game somehow wants you to both micromanage her and also not to micromanage her, as Rio will get defensive if she feels you're being too overbearing.  Which is, of course, troublesome for this kind of game, since you are literally guiding Rio by the hand the entire time.  Moreover, Rio often approaches situations like a sledgehammer, even when the various puzzles in the game require more finesse.  It is not uncommon for Rio's own AI to just screw up a puzzle by turning an element too much or hitting too many buttons.  The biggest fight in this game is, often, just the fight to get Rio to do anything right.

Combat

But there is also actual combat you must contend with.  Boy is there combat.  So the way that combat works is that Rio is on the floor actually fighting the aliens.  The problem is that she doesn't know where to aim really.  Each alien type has different body parts that she can fire out, and some deal more damage to them than others.  And, moreover, if you successfully destroy a body part, you can disable certain attacks, essentially making the alien less dangerous.  This is all information that you, as the Operator, have accessible to you.  Your security feeds are always scanning the monsters for their biology and their weakpoints.  Once you have the loadout of what you're dealing with, it's up to you to instruct Rio on where and when to run, dodge, and fire.  This is why "in her mouth" is a joke, you often have the option to fire directly into the mouth of the aliens, which can be devastating if performed correctly.

As you could maybe imagine, given the previous statements on the limitations of the vocal recognition software and Rio's own AI, this has every opportunity to go horribly wrong.  While Rio's inability to solve puzzles and scan environments can cause a lot of frustration in to the player, the fact that these are relatively low stress environments with which to interact with her gives the player the grace with her to enter an ideology akin to "I just gotta be patient with her and we can get through this".  Combat is, literally, life or death.  Rio can only take a few hits before she dies, and she not only needs to be dealing damage to the opponent, she needs to be avoiding their onslaught.  Regular enemy fights can be insurmountable walls as early as an hour into the game, as you try to manage a woman who is haphazardly utilizing a handgun she just received and who, famously, does not take orders well.  If you can get the game to recognize your commands, Rio is quick to follow.  Unfortunately, that's really the hard part isn't it?

The attempts to allow Rio to function on her own in combat also do not work.  Near the end of the game's "first act", you will find a command which allows Rio to behave autonomously in combat.  This is, at first, seemingly very handy as giving commands in the midst of combat is very difficult.  Unfortunately, this is not a system of "you tell Rio to act on her own and she makes optimal moves".  Instead, the game chooses to present a system in which Rio's AI will level up the more you trust her to handle things on her own.  So when you get the command, Rio's automatic combat AI is absolutely worthless, she misses like 70% of all shots, it hasn't learned to target weak points, it is basically flying blind.  But as you rely on her, the game will start to make her smarter, enable her to make better decisions in combat.  Hypothetically, this is an interesting mechanic to explore.

There are two major issues with this though.  The first is that you receive this command at the end of the game's first major area and, more importantly, after you would fight the first boss of the game.  This means that Rio is already a substantial portion through the space station and past many of the "gimme" enemies the game has to offer.  There is no effective place to allow Rio to get smarter in combat, by the time you have access to this option which, supposedly, is meant to be helpful you are already past the point where you could realistically start providing Rio a path to allow her AI to grow.  It's rather unfortunate that the AI is not, say, recording the way the Operator tells Rio to fight and putting together a series of "x enemy = this strategy".  I'm sure that would be a technical nightmare even today, much less back in 2003 (although today they would just shortcut it using AI and everyone would hate it), but it also makes this command next to useless.  Alternatively, maybe we should've just started with it, instead of having to unlock it as we progress in the story.

But even if you did want to work with this command, you run into a second issue: grinding.  You could, hypothetically, grind Rio's AI on enemy encounters as soon as you receive the command and buff her up before progress.  Many standard enemy encounters will respawn after you enter and exit so many rooms, so you could just fight those and get Rio where you need her to be.  It'd be time consuming but you could do it, right?  Except, no.  You couldn't.  Because Lifeline is a survival horror game.  Lifeline is not especially stingy with resources, mind you, it clearly understands that you need a bit of a safety net because of how frustrating it can be working with the voice control.  But it does have limited resources, there are limited healing items, limited inventory slots, and a lot of things that can go wrong within these specifications.  Having the time to train Rio isn't the issue, having the resources to train her is.  You could spend all your time grinding her AI to get good at the combat to take the burden off yourself, but you are also very likely to run out of heals.  Moreover, as Rio upgrades her weapons, she loses out on infinite ammunition.  So, not only is grinding a bad idea for the potential to run out of heals, it is a bad idea because you can literally softlock yourself at a certain point by running out of ammunition and not having a gun powerful enough to go forward.

The difficulty of the game is also, just generally, unnaturally high.  The way you control this game is obviously a huge part of its difficulty, Rio is constantly fighting you whether she knows it or not.  But the game is just hard.  Enemies ramp up way too quickly, evolving from simple slug like enemies that take a few shots to kill to massive monsters with six to eight moving parts before you're even out of the first area.  And, unlike other survival horror games of its era, you are not intended to skip encounters.  Whereas something like a Resident Evil game or a Silent Hill game is primarily about avoiding unnecessary firefights to conserve resources, you are often locked into an enemy encounter in Lifeline when one occurs.  You would assume that, given the game's incredibly unique gameplay style, that it would go a little easier on the player.  Create a margin of error to allow them to progress given the hurdles.  Instead, Lifeline is the kind of game where enemies are so prohibitively difficult that every single encounter could take 3-5 tries to get through.  And this is saying nothing of the bosses, which can legitimately take hundreds of tries to get through depending on how much Rio wants to listen.

Rio

Rio herself is also a very questionable of this game, both in her characterization and in her function to the player.  Rio is always depicted as someone who knows more than they're telling.  They're keeping secrets, it's clear that their reason for being here is more than just being hired as a cocktail waitress, and the player is meant to be suspicious of her and her motivations on some level.  As the game goes on, the player discovers that Rio is heavily involved in what is going on with this alien invasion.  Many years ago, Rio was living on Earth with her family.  Her father was a brilliant scientific mind whose research unlocked the alchemical secrets of the Philosopher's Stone.  Stay with me.  Upon this discovery, a target was put on his back, and one night one of his rivals broke into his house and murdered his wife and shot his daughter Rio.  Rio's father cut a deal: let him use the Philosopher's Stone to save his little girl, and he will go with the men willingly.  Rio was saved, but effectively orphaned, and has spent her entire life hunting down the men who kidnapped her father trying to save them.  She has, in effect, been playing dumb the entire time, playing the convenient role of a sexy 20-something cocktail waitress to find her way to the man who kidnapped her father and see justice done.  She not only knows way more than she's letting on, but is even implied by the story to be a genius who is the only person besides her father that can truly unlock the secrets of the Philosopher's Stone.

This is, quite honestly, unbelievable.  Not because of how absurd the plot is, it's a Japanese survival horror game, the plot being absurd is par for the course.  It's basically accepted within Resident Evil that the last 1/3 of the game is going to have a crazy last minute plot twist that kills the tone and atmosphere of the early bits.  No, it's unbelievable because the game is telling you things about Rio that you know are just simply not true.  We know she isn't some sort of genius, we know she isn't just convenient playing dumb.  We've been guiding her for hours at this point.  She doesn't understand how to work a safe!  It is bold of the game to try and convince us that Rio is some sort of genius double agent who is so good at playing dumb that she fools us all when we have spent so much time with her being actually very very dumb.  It is one of the most egregious examples of a game's story and a game's gameplay actively conflicting with one another, a level of ludonarrative dissonance that tends to make players furious when they get to it.

But what Rio's actual purpose in the game is?  That's the part where it gets a little uncomfortable.  As the game goes on, Rio starts to develop a romantic attachment to the Operator.  Despite knowing he is in a happy and healthy relationship and finding his girlfriend being a pretty driving part of the plot, Rio cannot help but catch feelings for the person helping her through this nightmare.  She begins to ask the Operator personal questions, slowly peeling back layers of their own psyche, finding things she truly likes about them.  She is committed to the goal of aiding them in finding their girlfriend, but it's clear that she also wants to pursue a relationship with the Operator.  It's a tale as old as time: you fall in love with a taken guy as you're trying to help him find his missing girlfriend.  There's just like one thing about this whole story that makes it very weird: the Operator is the player.

This is, perhaps, the most confusing decision about Lifeline.  Lifeline, despite its more absurd and frustrating elements, is pretty committed to being a survival horror.  The situation is intense, the resources scarce, the monsters terrifying.  It is very much a hardline horror game with sci-fi elements to it.  Except it tacks on a virtual girlfriend simulator.  In the midst of this horror game.  Like it's not a separate mode when you can just relax with Rio and talk to her, Rio is meant to be your virtual girlfriend right in the middle of you trying to make sure she doesn't get killed by discount Xenomorphs.  It's weird.  It's just simply weird.  Like, I know why they did this, gaming was a very different thing in the 2000s, we were way more sexist.  The first iterations of the show that would eventually become the Game Awards literally had a category for "sexiest video game women".  It was assumed that video games, especially games in more "hardcore" genres, had primarily male audiences in the 15-34 year old demographic, and that said audiences' primary want for a female character was not exactly great writing.

But also this is just absurd?  Like, it's not just a natural thing, either, it's not solely a matter of "as the game progresses and you hypothetically grow more attached to Rio, romance can blossom".  The game actively wants to pursue this element.  There are dozens of commands that you can give Rio, many of which are gameplay related, some of them are fun little easter eggs, but a pretty substantial portion of what you can tell Rio fits in the category of "romance".  Or, worse "objectification posing as romance".  You can tell her to bark like a dog.  You can tell her to pose sexy for you.  You can engage in conversations which are entirely about you, the player's, romantic life.  It's weird.  It's really weird.  It is the kind of thing that a certain section of the audience is going to defend with their lives and that section of the audience is, hopefully, not around that much anymore.  It is part of a pretty poor trend of how we used to depict women in gaming that I would like to think we have moved away from, and it seems like we have given how often weirdos online complain that games aren't for men anymore.

If you could not tell, from this extended section, Lifeline is a pretty bad video game.  Mechanically it barely works, it doesn't give the player much leeway despite the way they have to control the game, it focuses on what are probably the wrong parts of its premise given the voice control nature of it.  It is truly one of the messiest video games of all time.  You cannot help but admire its ambition, its attempts to pave the way for an all-new style of gameplay that no one has ever really tried before.  But it's difficult to want to applaud it after you've spent three hours fighting Rio to do anything, your voice sore and your hopes shattered.  Its reputation is more than earned and I completely understand why people view it as, at best, a novelty and at worst one of the worst games ever made.  There's just one thing about it for me personally, one teensy-tiny ripple that I can't get over...

Lifeline Is One of My Favorite Video Games Of All Time

I started this post out by establishing that Lifeline is a guilty pleasure for me, a game I love despite knowing it's pretty terrible.  But the extent of my love for Lifeline is far greater than I think I implied at first.  I don't just like Lifeline despite acknowledging its faults, I love this game.  To the point that, for a while, Ed having awful taste in video games was a joke amongst my friend group.  Everyone else who has played this game that I know despises it with a burning passion and meanwhile I'm out here like "y'all this game is a masterpiece".  Granted, a lot of the reason why I love this game is just the absurdity of its plot.  I do get an ironic sense of joy out of how bold the decisions made in this game are.  But I also do genuinely enjoy Lifeline.  For as much as some of my appreciation of it is ironic, much much more of it comes from a place of sincerity.

Plot

But first let's talk about absurdity of this game's story.  The game starts out pretty normal, you're trapped on a space station hotel in the midst of an alien invasion, you have to rely on your new friend Rio to rescue you and got off this floating tincan, standard sci-fi stuff.  The first big twist comes, however, when the military finally arrives.  The military set up roadblocks for Rio to proceed, effectively insuring that you, and your still missing girlfriend cannot be saved.  The reason?  They are planning on shooting the space station out of orbit.  See, the space station is not simply sitting up on outer orbit, a derelict ship that the Japanese government can evacuate and then abandon.  It is actively on a crash course for Earth.  And this was done intentionally by the station's head scientist, a man named Joe Powers.

Joe Powers is, as you might've guessed, the man who abducted Rio's father.  He has been attempting to conduct experiments on the Philosopher's Stone for decades now, and he believes that he has finally cracked the code.  His plan is to seal himself within one of the station's safety pods, a near indestructible containment unit created in case the Station ever fell from orbit, at which point the ship would crash into Earth, allowing Powers to get rescued with the stone in tow.  He then wishes to continue his research on Earth, developing a powerful weapon with which he can become the richest and most influential person on the planet.  A role he will presumably be able to maintain forever, as he has just unlocked the secret to immortality.

The Japanese military, as you might imagine, does not want a piece of space debris the size of a 5 star hotel crashing into the planet, bringing about the end of the world because of what is contained within it.  So their plan is to evacuate anyone not involved with the science division of the station and then nuke it out of orbit, destroying Joe Powers, the philosopher's stone, and the aliens that have arrived on the station.  Rio, however, won't let this stand as she needs to still find the Operator and his girlfriend, Naomi.  So she petitions for them to allow her past the blockade.  If she finds the Operator and his girlfriend, they will use the escape pods in the security wing to escape.  If not, they will go down with the ship.  The military hands her a gun and a uniform change and lets her past.  With the knowledge that no one will save them, Rio steps into the lab sector.

After fighting through more enemies, Rio encounters a bizarre sight: a brain in a jar that is capable of speaking through a digital voice.  Rio attempts to ask the brain questions, but it shuts her down pretty quickly.  This brain, you see, has become jaded.  Angry at the world.  Which is, you know.  Valid, given whoever this brain used to belong to is essentially dead, only existing as a floating brain in the jar.  It's incapable of connecting to other people, of understanding their plight.  Only driven by its deep-seeded hatred of one specific man: Joe Powers.  Joe Powers did this to this brain, removed the body down to its most basic components as a punishment.  A punishment for deceiving Joe Powers many years ago.  A punishment for choosing to hide its research somewhere, somewhere Joe could never find it.  For the brain, you see, is Rio's father.  And he never gave Joe Powers the Philosopher's Stone.

So, as previously stated, long ago Joe Powers descended upon Rio's childhood home, murdered her mother and shot her.  As she lay bleeding out, Rio's father cut a deal: if he could use the stone to heal his little girl, he would go with Joe willingly.  That is, for many years, what Rio believed happened.  However, it turns out that shortly after healing Rio, the stone completely disappeared.  Joe Powers has not been running experiments for the past decades to unlock the secrets of the stone, he's been doing it to create a new one.  And his failures to do so are all over the space station.  You've been fighting them throughout the entire game.  Dear reader, there is no alien invasion.  Every single monster you have fought is a failed experiment to recreate the Philosopher's Stone.

Joe Powers has been, essentially, finding people who need help desperately.  People dying of cancer, people who can't walk anymore, people who are on the brink of death.  The people who, even in the future where we can put a hotel in space, have no hope of a cure or a fix for their condition.  He contacts them and states that he is developing an experimental treatment in his lab orbiting Earth.  He pays for their transit and brings them aboard, at which point he imprisons them in his lab and begins running tests on them.  The Philosopher's Stone, among it's many other properties, is meant to heal those who come into contact with it.  Grant them a full life.  Even grant them immortality.  So, if he finds the right formula to create it, he'll know because it can cure these people with no hope.  But he never really did.  So what happened instead was that each and every person he experimented on mutated into a horrible monster.  And on the night of the Christmas party, one of them finally escaped.  Breaking the containment of Powers' lab and invading the rest of the space station.  Throughout the game, you have not been killing aliens, you've been killing horribly mutated humans.

So what happened to the real Philosopher's Stone?  Well, I want to bring you back to the night Rio's father got kidnapped.  Rio got shot and her father had to rush to save her.  Now, he could've simply used the Philosopher's Stone and been done with it, but that would mean Joe Powers getting his hands on a potential weapon that could end the world.  So, working fast, Rio's father implanted the stone into Rio's heart.  It has been keeping her alive this entire time.  Not only that but, unbeknownst to Rio herself, it has given her superhuman abilities.  It's why her reflexes are so quick, why she can take so much damage before going down, why, despite being dumb as bricks as we've already established, she can analyze an enemy well enough to know what the Operator means by "left Thorax".  Rio is a super soldier.  The most powerful object in the history of the world lives inside the heart of a cocktail waitress who believed that she could easily infiltrate a space station to get revenge on its head scientist and NO ONE would ever notice her.  This game is so funny.  Anyways, Rio's father hopes that Rio lived a long and happy life, unaware that he is talking to her, unable to recognize her even if he could see.  And so Rio does the hard thing.  She does the right thing.  She puts her father out of his misery, draining the brain.

There is just one last hanging thread we need to address, though, isn't there?  What happened to Naomi?  She has been missing this entire time, after all, not dead just.  Missing.  Leaving both the Operator and Rio hopeful that she can be found.  Our answer comes late into the game, as we approach the security sector and prepare to face Joe Powers.  And it comes at one of the lowest points of the journey, when Rio has been pushed to her limits and seems on the verge of collapse.  She is cornered by one of the most horrifying beasts on the station, and it looks like, for the first (or more like five hundredth time, to be honest) time, we aren't going to make it out of this.  Then the monster who cornered her gets destroyed by another monster, one we've seen a few times across our journey.  One that is bizarrely non-hostile.  And in this moment, it's looking to Rio with a need to help her.

This monster is, unsurprisingly, Naomi.  In the midst of the chaos of the initial attack, Naomi had been captured and brought down to Powers' lab.  She was, in a sense, Powers' final test subject, the proof of concept that he had successfully created a good enough rendition of the stone.  While the stone did mutate her considerably, it largely kept her humanoid form intact, not transforming her into a mindless beast.  Because of her love for the Operator, Naomi has actually successfully retained her humanity, trying to find her lover.  As such, she has been assisting Rio in her goal of making it to the Operator, trying to ensure all three can get off this ship together.  Bonded by their mutual connection to the Philosopher's Stone, Rio can understand Naomi, who currently can only talk through a bizarre backwards language.  Unfortunately, Naomi's time is almost over.

Naomi has realized what she has become.  She seemed a bit confused by it for a while, not aware of what she was, but now she sees she has become a bizarre alien monster.  What's more is that she's fading away.  Not in the sense that she is becoming more monstrous, but in the sense that she is unstable.  Her new form is breaking down, at any moment she will fade into stardust.  Protecting Rio is, if anything, her last stand.  She believes that Rio can absorb her essence to revitalize her, and so sits with her as she dies, sacrificing herself to give power to the true wielder of the Philosopher's Stone at her lowest moment.  She asks Rio to apologize to the Operator for not being able to make it, and to tell him that she loves him.  And then she fades away, her essence giving Rio a much needed power boost, allowing her to move on.  We mourn Naomi for a brief second... and then Rio realizes that her hurdle has just been cleared for her, meaning that she can now go after the Operator unfettered.  I kid, I kid.  Rio is actually super messed up by Naomi's sacrifice, it's like the weight of everything that happened, all the people who have died or that she has had to kill, hits her at once.

Unfortunately we can't linger on that too long, because who appears at this moment to try and put a bullet in Rio's head?  Joe.  Powers.  This is it, Rio's final confrontation with the man she's been hunting for decades now.  He goes down immediately.  Something I do appreciate about the decisions this game makes is that they stick to the idea that Rio's ability to survive things is because of her superhuman biology as given by the stone.  Every other character in this game just dies to literally nothing.  Rio drops Joe in one shot.  And then rescues the Operator, boarding the two escape pods still on the ship.  Unfortunately things cannot be that simple, and Joe returns to life, resurrected and mutated by his incomplete Philosopher's Stone into a massive monster.  Rio and the Operator work together to defeat the Titanic beast, and fly off from the ship, having survived.  Everyone might be dead, but hey, at least Rio now has a chance, amirite?

The plot is stupid.  Like, just so absurd.  It probably sounds absurd just describing it, it twists in so many ways and introduces just absolutely insane concepts.  Like, they really went all in on the Philosopher's Stone.  But it is actively hilarious experiencing it.  I think Lifeline has only not gotten a reputation for being one of the great "so bad it's good" stories in gaming just because by the time you hit the ridiculous parts of it, everyone is so frustrated by dealing with Rio that they just are done.  That literally did happen to most of my friends who experienced this game, they were out of it for hours by the time the game started compounding ridiculous elements to its story.  Though the absolute insanity that is "Joe Powers" hits everyone eventually.  I adore this story though, it's insane, but in such a fun and sincere way.  It commits to having the most absurd storyline possible in a way that I admire greatly.  I will go to bat for Lifeline's story, it's so fun.

Ambition

But, more importantly, I do genuinely and sincerely love this game.  Why?  The very thing that arguably is the reason why it's so bad: its ambition.  Lifeline is an entirely unique thing.  A game that could only exist in an era where we hadn't yet decided what makes "good gameplay".  I feel like people forget how experimental games were on the PS1 and PS2.  How often developers tried to take advantage of CD techonology to allow you to load up music CDs to meaningfully impact gameplay.  The attempts to do motion control/camera based gameplay.  And yes, even the attempts to make voice controlled gaming a valid gameplay style, something that could be nurtured to create really in-depth experiences.  Lifeline is ahead of its time, voice controls would continue to be experimented with in a significant capacity for a long time and nowadays we could in fact probably make this game work.  Hey Konami, remake Lifeline.  Don't do that, Rio will just be a generative AI, it would be disappointing and unethical.

Lifeline's unique setup, a story and gameplay style that puts the player into the game, is incredibly fascinating to me.  Even though the execution might leave a lot to be desired, when I am playing Lifeline, even in my most frustrated moments, I don't feel that the game is a failure.  The relationship it forms between player and game is challenging, it argues for a level of immersion that a lot of people would likely find unsettling.  Including myself.  As much as I adore this game for this very reason, I also find it deeply unsettling how much it asks the player to be involved within its world.  How much it asks the player to form a personal connection with Rio, not just as an observer experiencing a story, but as an active participant in her life.  It wants the player to form a genuine relationship with this character, both in the sense that you're meant to form a partnership and the game wants you to be romantically involved with her in some capacity.

But, in being uncomfortable, it makes you ask questions.  Should a game break these boundaries.  Should the player be immersed to this degree.  Especially with the rise of AI chat bots and people's obsession with their virtual girlfriends as a result, this boundary is very much broken every day whether we like it or not.  There is a conversation to be had around Lifeline, around when a piece of art goes "too far" in immersing its playerbase.  But at the same time, it makes one wonder if this is valid.  If you can cross boundaries for the sake of an artistic work regardless of if those boundaries are wise.  In other mediums, crossing boundaries is not just common but is a challenging part of the artistic process.  The boundaries that Lifeline crosses might very well be unwise to cross but that doesn't mean they never should be, you know?  And while some of the reasons Lifeline crosses this boundary are pretty gross, others are infinitely compelling.

Lifeline creates such a unique situation that even when it fails to work, as it often does, I can't help but admire it.  Like I said before, even as it is its most frustrating self, a game in which the core functions of it often don't work, I find myself more intrigued than annoyed.  It's such a specific work of art, the kind of thing that gets created when someone has a ton of ambition, a ton of creativity, and is standing upon the threshold of being able to realize it but is just unable to solidify it.  It is something that just could not exist anymore, a game trying something completely all its own with the weight of a major studio behind it, but without the baggage that comes with understanding what "good game design" is.  It's a symbol from a messier time, when trying something was a goal within itself.

I'm not someone who hates the modern game industry, who favors an older time.  I can pretty confidently say that we are frankly spoiled nowadays, games that would've been industry defining hits in the olden days are now just normal every day occurrences.  We are so inundated with good games that partaking in the hobby at all is proving taxing.  But we are too polished nowadays, too familiar with what "good game design" is.  We know what does and does not work and are often too scared to deviate from that.  Lifeline represents a much messier, much worse, but much more creative time.  A time when gaming was allowed to be weird, allowed to try things without the worry that they wouldn't go well.  It's art in its truest form in a lot of ways, the fact that it is a bad game almost comes secondary to how unique of a work it is.

This is also just something about me as a person.  While I certainly enjoy "good" games, interesting games are the ones that really stick with me.  Everybody can make a Metroidvania, not everyone can make an entirely voice controlled survival horror game.  I've played many games since playing Lifeline, many many games.  Just in the past 6 years the number of games I've beaten numbers in the hundreds.  And yet, most of those games roll off my back.  While most of them were good, often excellent, Lifeline is just so weird that you cannot help but love it.  In my mind, it's a masterpiece.  Just a true, unadulterated, unfettered work of art that no one has or likely ever will come close to recreating.  Is it horrible?  Absolutely.  But it's also very beautiful.  It is one of the worst, and yet one of the best.  And I wish I had the confidence in Konami to remake and finally realize its potential without resorting to generative AI for Rio's listening and responses or else I would be like "no but seriously, make a remake that fixes what is wrong with Rio".  But I'm not sure I would even want that, truly.  I think it being kind of awful is part of the charm, you know?