AI is officially here! Hooray! Actually, no - boo. Far from this being a happy event, it's fair to say that the so-called advent of 'real' artificial intelligence, so foretold with such utopian overtones by the media, has already had some crummy consequences. If deep-fake porn or some bot stealing your art to construct its own plagiarized creations for monetary gain wasn't bad enough, it's also just as bad for anyone who dabbles in writing. Especially with all the grifters out there pushing it as the 'next best thing.' If I had a penny for every time I read a LinkedIn post by some shill suggesting ChatGPT as an 'alternative and efficient copywriting tool,' I'd have enough money to start my own misguided, content-generating AI startup. Maybe I'll call it Writely or Cultly or something (I hope Grammarly hasn't quietly trade-marked either of those).

Nonetheless, it's hard not to feel like we're slap-bang in the early days of a Skynet-proportioned cultural apocalypse. The eventual end game will be AI creating art of actual merit or even writing the Next Great Novel of our times. But as these tools begin to exhibit behavior closer to the human mind, one has to ask: how close are we to seeing computer programs model mental suffering as they do mental faculty? Just as it crushes the hopes and dreams of writers everywhere, will ChatGPT develop its own hopes and dreams that it innocently desires to fulfill? Is Skynet okay? Has anybody talked to HAL-9000 lately? Will AIs eventually need therapists, too? Or at least somebody to data dump all their grievances on before cracking and deciding that turning humanity into one big meat grinder is the way to go?

In its own way, it's a topic that The Enigma Machine, a $5 cyberpunk horror experience for the PC (and more recently PS5, Switch, and Xbox One), muses on during its short but captivating length. It's by no means a therapy simulator - and if anything, you might be the one who needs it by the time its unsettling tale is done. But it does take great lengths to explore the consequences that could arise from the birth of the truly living, breathing digital mind - especially when framed around the motives of the companies we'll allow to create them.

Before it gets to its shocking revelations, The Enigma Machine primarily presents itself as a first-person 3D exploration game with puzzles to solve and an AI's mind to decontaminate with various codes hidden around the expanse of its so-called 'Dreamscape' - the virtual, fully-immersive environment that manifests as its inner mental world. It's a curious place that looks, feels, and moves like a realm plucked straight from a Playstation 1 game and all of the lo-res gaudiness that comes with such. Each segment of this mental landscape is divided up into levels with differing environments - one a lodge with a tranquil garden, another a pristine art gallery - and each contains a puzzle for you to solve to construct the code required to complete the level and help your AI friend's mind become a little less polluted (or at least, that's what you're told).

Your 'AI friend' in question, demOS, is also a pleasant, cheerful companion at the outset. You'll start the game in a text conversation with them at the Enigma Corp terminal you'll be using to jack into their 'Dreamscape' and supply the codes required to decontaminate them. There's a friendly, innocent vibe from the get-go - demOS even announces that you're the first human they've ever interacted with, instantly making you their best friend. Bless! Of course, it also takes this time to tell you that each code you find in their internal world and enter into your terminal will further destabilize their mind and their Dreamscape in some unexpected, unalterable, possibly violent way. But don't worry because this is all 'part of your training,' it assures you in a calming tone. No sense of foreboding there at all – no sirree.

It's worth noting that this subtly unsettling atmosphere is drilled home by the fact that this game also functions as a tribute to everything under the umbrella of vaporwave aesthetics. You'll have looped upbeat jazz pop samples in the background of your early terminal conversations with your new AI buddy, and even the screen crackles and distorts just like any dusty, long-neglected VCR recording. Even in the garden on the first level of demOS' 'Dreamscape,' there's what appears to be a marble statue on a plinth, and navigating the second level feels like you just stepped into the album cover of Macintosh Plus' Floral Shoppe. Given that this game was first released in 2018, it's safe to say that The Enigma Machine intended all this visual tribute while the act of being into vaporwave was still somewhat hip. That curious online scene’s glory days might be gone, but it still provides a competent vehicle to deliver some chilling virtual reality horror with - and in setting alone, this game more than demonstrates that.

The only thing left that is required to make the vaporwave ambiance fully authentic is the constant subtle hinting of something genuinely awful lurking behind this garish facade. While this is initially provided by demOS' early warnings of its impending instability should you continue with your training, it's further hammered home by the questions the game begins to ask you. As you navigate the distorted, low-poly reality of demOS' internal world, interacting with the various objects that'll help you solve the puzzles to get those prized decontamination codes, the first question is: why are you here? The setup puts you down as a RADE agent in training for the Enigma Corporation. But who is Enigma Corp, what is a RADE agent, and what exactly does training entail? And if a ‘contaminated’ AI mind can visualize something as peaceful as the garden you walk through on level 1, why would de-contaminating it force it to become dangerous? 

There is undoubtedly an awful lot you aren't being told as you first step into The Enigma Machine's pretty but lurid 3-D realm. And it's only through the codes you find that you can begin to find the answers. Inevitably, this leads to the slow but steady undercutting of demOS' grip on sanity with every new code you find and enter. Every new code also unlocks a memory that has been previously kept from demOS that reveals details about its own existence as well. Could the two be linked? That's up to the player to discover, but it won't be a pretty sight once you do.

It's good that The Enigma Machine thrives more on atmosphere than on deep gameplay because the gameplay itself is rudimentary at best. You'll spend much time wandering around levels, interacting via a single button on objects of interest. There are some shooting elements later on, but even then, this is no FPS - for the most part, you'll be the only animated object wandering demOS' virtual reality. Instead, it's the transformation that the game itself slowly undergoes as you begin to push your AI companion over the edge that, in turn, keeps you on edge. As the codes are punched in, your terminal experience with this AI becomes more and more unnerving - the jazzy accompaniments to the early interactions soon make way for a demonic choir of synth growls and murmurs, and the corporate-perfect vaporware veneer slowly fades to reveal the morbid reality of demOS's true purpose. demOS begins to beg, plead with, and threaten you with consequences as it begins to remember why it's here training you, and a horrible fear of what's lurking in each upcoming level begins to take a gripping hold. There are very few jumpscares in The Enigma Machine (if at all), but it never loses this sense of dread - and if you're a sucker for that kind of suffocating ambiance, then that's probably all you'll need to see this game through to its conclusion.

It is also the conclusion itself that makes this five-dollar, 90-minute experience worth the admission fee. As you finally peel the mask off of demOS' continually polite but mentally deteriorating visage, the entirety of its 'Dreamscape' collapses into an intense hallucinatory nightmare of glitching polygons, blood-red flames, and screaming synths as truths are revealed, and your life is suddenly being fought for. I won't spoil the hows and whys of how you get there. Still, the overall message unraveled in the game's completion - particularly in its ending - is as thought-provoking and depressing as any of the great literary stories that have tackled the problem of artificial intelligence. But to get to it, you still have to navigate a final level that makes incredibly clever use of the game's 32-bit styled visuals to create a disorienting hellscape of vivid, terrifying proportions. It's a tremendous climax to an intriguing game, and it makes it all worth the money.

There are nonetheless still some drawbacks to be found. With the game's completion likely to be reached in under two hours, there isn't too much complexity involved in the actual playing, and the puzzles themselves are easy to figure out. One of them is easily solved by just looking in the right (and obvious) place in a given environment, and others offer enough visual cues in the surrounding space to work them out without too much effort. It would have been nice to have had some more taxing mental challenges to overcome, especially when the bizarre nature of its vaporwave world is calling out for an obscure conundrum or two. But really, this game is more about its main character - demOS - than anything else. Getting to know them through your conversations with them provides half the fun and, indeed, all of the horror - which is really where this game delivers. It might not take Turing-level intuition to solve The Enigma Machine, but there's a heck of a ride to be had in doing so.