When the team at indie studio Sunset Visitor were wrapping up their critically acclaimed first game, 1000xResist, it wasn’t long before they started thinking about what they’d tackle next. According to creative director Remy Siu, the studio’s goal is to always find ways to reflect the world around them. So when they were looking at the cultural landscape in 2024, there was one theme they couldn’t avoid: AI. “That was when we really wanted to dive into what we see as a long tradition of science fiction writing and thinking about artificial intelligence,” he explains. “So we thought it was a very interesting time to engage with that in a work of art.”
Today, Sunset Visitor is announcing its second game, a narrative adventure called Prove You’re Human. It’s coming to Steam at launch, though a release date has yet to be set. You play as a character named Santana who has been hired by a tech company on the verge of achieving AGI. Her job is to convince the company’s AI, named Mesa, that it isn’t actually human. Prove You’re Human is set in a Severance-like universe where Santana has her consciousness split. One half lives in the digital realm where you interact with Mesa, while your physical body is out in the real world, creating CAPTCHAs of your environment. In the game, these different selves are visually distinct; the digital world is rendered in 3D graphics, while the “real” world updates come in the form of live-action video.
“There is a trap to get too specific.”
No AI tools were used in the development of Prove You’re Human, and Siu says that research was done through a combination of watching YouTube videos of people using AI tools, and referencing classic sci-fi literature about the dangers of artificial intelligence. Given how quickly AI technology has evolved over the time since development began, he says that the narrative team have had to change and update things along the way to reflect what’s happening in reality. That said, he notes that “There is a trap to get too specific, and that is not our intention. What always grounds us is what will be true from an affectual standpoint even as we continue the rest of this decade and, I suppose, beyond.”
Image: Sunset Visitor
As with 1000xResist, Prove You’re Human is being built by a relatively small team, one with a large focus on narrative. That includes three writers, a filmmaker working on the live-action footage, three programmers, two artists, and a producer role helmed by Nhi Do, the actress who voiced the Watcher character in 1000xResist. New this time around is that Sunset is working with Slay the Princess developer Black Tabby Games, which will serve as Prove You’re Human’s publisher as part of a new venture. Black Tabby has been involved from the very early stages of the game, and Siu says the two-person company has provided valuable insight for the development team.
“It feels like [Black Tabby cofounders Abby Howard and Tony Howard-Arias] have organically become dramaturges for the game, in the sense that they get to be outside of the day-to-day operations of making the game — they’re not in the writers room — but when we come up for air and have difficult problems to solve from a story perspective, we do talk to them about it and bounce ideas off of them,” Siu explains. “That’s something that has been really fun and injects lots of energy into the process.”
“AI stories have existed in science fiction and fantasy since the inception of the genre.”
For their part, the Black Tabby team say that it was Prove You’re Human that helped inspire them to get into publishing right now, something they had previously considered doing much later in their careers. “We heard [Siu’s] pitch, and that’s when we decided to spin up our publisher,” Abby Howard says. “It just seemed like the right place at the right time.”
Whenever it comes out, Prove You’re Human will join a rich history of AI stories, one that has only felt more prescient and important as the technology continues to develop in the real world. The team has been looking at various AI fiction as a source of inspiration; Siu cites AMC’s dystopic workplace thriller Pantheon as one recent example, along with classics dating back to Frankenstein and Pinocchio. The idea is to build on that history with a narrative that feels particularly relevant now.
“Something that we’ve been aware of in the writers room is the fact that AI stories have existed in science fiction and fantasy since the inception of the genre,” says writer Natalie Checo. “We want to tackle this story in the context of what it means to make a game about AI — not an LLM, but an AI in the year 2026.”
