Day 110 - Assessment Examination
Horror, Nightmare Fuel, REDACTED ·
Skeeter’s Take:
I believe the Assessment Examination would fall into the “Analog Horror” genre that’s been gaining a lot of traction recently. Analog horror is basically an offshoot of the found footage genre, except it generally uses different mediums to tell the story. For Example, Local 58 uses a mock 80s/90s news station to drip feed the audience information on the horrors that are happening in their world. Where a found footage film would typically have someone with a video camera capture the height of the action and horror, analog horror generally leaves the horror off screen and tries to paint a picture and give clues to what’s happening. It also tends to stray away from jump scares and generally uses memorable imagery and atmosphere to create its horror.
The Assessment Examination is classified by the dev as “survey horror”:
I have never played a “survey horror” game before, and while the name “survey horror” does sound a little silly, the idea actually goes kind of hard.
I’m fairly certain that The Assessment Examination is based on an old psychological study where participants were sat in front of a screen and were quickly shown faces of different individuals. I believe the participants had to decide if the face looked friendly or unfriendly as quickly as they could, but I don’t remember all the details and I went looking for the study, but couldn’t find it (ok, I spent like 10 minutes looking. Our daily entries don’t cater that much to well researched reviews.) If I remember correctly, they were testing something about stereotypes and first impressions people have of other individuals.
The Assessment Examination is very similar to this experiment. I am welcomed to the Authenticity Assessment Department by “Microsoft Sam does JCS Narrator”. He tells me that the people at A.A.D. are very excited to have received my application for the position with their department. He tells me this is an assessment to see if I am a good fit for said position. The scan lines blur my vision as I try to read the questions:
Some… interesting questions for a job application. I wasn’t planning on weighing my fear of death or the possibility of God today, but here I am. I didn’t even know they could ask these questions during a job interview. I press on, answering the questions as honestly as I can.
I get to the next part of the assessment - Microsoft JCS shows up again to tell me the next part will test my Authenticity Assessment skill. I will be shown a picture of someone’s face and will need to determine if they are trustworthy or a threat. Here are some samples:
While I’m going through and doing my best to threat-assess, my survey seems to glitch and I’m shown a few strange images in-between the garbled faces:
Ok, so that’s a Valium prescription and a child’s drawing - weird. I don’t know what the hell any of this means, but I keep going past them to the next face I have to deem “trust” or “threat”.
As I’m nearing the end of the examination, I am shown a police call transcript on screen. It’s a call from a man working at a gas station at Dore Park. He said there’s a kid outside with blood on him. The dispatcher on the line asks why the kid is still outside and the gas station worker reveals that he’s scared to let the kid in, and that he doesn’t think the kid is hurt. He tells the dispatcher:
He said he saw the kid flash a face like a demon or something and that he’s not going out there to help. He doesn’t trust the kid, and he’s scared. The dispatcher tells him he needs to help, that he can’t just leave a bleeding kid to die, and that refusing to comply can be considered a crime. The clip ends as he goes out to check on the kid as the dispatcher stays on the line.
I notice the transcript was also accompanied by a name, an age, and the phrase “VICTIM 2”.
Immediately after I am shown this, I am given another facial trust assessment - but this one is different:
It’s a fucked up looking kid! Almost like the kid the gas station worker was describing… Over the next series of assessments, this image morphs to the following young boy:
And after making my selection on the above photo, I am congratulated for completing the assessment! I am told that if I am selected I will receive a letter on exactly:
I am told if a letter arrives before this time, I am to do the following:
I can’t wait to see if I get accepted!
I was going to end it there, but I actually replayed it to get a screenshot I missed for the review and I answered “threat” to every answer and I actually got a different ending with some missing posters of various victims, and then a snippet of a phone conversation of the gas station worker as it slowly zooms in on his redacted missing poster:
I thought that was pretty neat. I figured the choices would have no consequences, but I am pleasantly surprised.
The “story” The Assessment Examination tells is fairly simple when you break it down. There are creatures or demons (I’m leaning more heavily to the latter due to the religious questions and the “pray” suggestion). These demons can disguise themselves as people, and people seem to go missing around them. There’s an organization looking to recruit people that are able to recognize these creatures while they are disguised, so we can infer the issue is big enough to warrant a team of individuals that are trying to combat the demons. How? We don’t really know. That’s most of what I could gather, but it’s sort of all this game needs. Since so much is being told through a survey (and “glitched” police records that seem to have been spliced in) there’s enough for the player to grab onto and decipher without explaining too much. I like that the height of the incident the player doesn’t even get to see. All we get is an idea of the threat, and the moments leading up to the threat. Again, I think this is a good example of the difference between found footage and analog horror. If this was found footage horror, the gas station worker would have been recording a video with his cellphone and the player would get to see “creepy kid change into demon and kill man, but he drops is phone just barely in frame, but not too much”. I appreciate that Assessment Examination instead uses the face assessment survey it’s already set up to show and infer that transformation. It gives the player just enough information to let the player’s imagination fill in the gaps.
I am making an assumption about this, but I am willing to bet the faces were generated by an AI. I’m guessing something like https://this-person-does-not-exist.com/en could have been used to generate the faces. I think this is a great argument that not all AI use is bad. The absolute feeling of uncanny is present in every one of the faces shown to the player. I think, if my assumption is correct, that this is a genius way to use the drawback of AI being not quite good enough at drawing faces and flipping that fact to tell a story about monsters pretending to be human. Plus, you can’t even claim it’s stealing art! It just stole the amalgamation of a bunch of people’s faces! Nothing sinister about that!
Overall, I liked the Assessment Examination. It definitely uses some typical tropes found in analog horror, but I can say I have never played a survey horror game before. Had a solid atmosphere and had great use of the “survey-type” game which will undoubtedly be the next biggest trend in gaming.
Recommend: Yeah
Replay Percentage Chance: 9%
Time Played: 10-15 Minutes
Sam’s Take:
I think I just like games with fucked up faces in black and white. The game is only 10/15 minutes long and Skeeter basically explained the whole thing. It’s a solid use of the uncanny to imply a greater world beyond the tiny window of the interview we take part in. The splicing in of the 911 call and other images were hit and miss for me. While they did add some context to the world outside of this interview, there was no reason for them to be spliced in logically, and it kind of breaks the fiction of us doing this job interview. It’s not a total deal breaker, there is a sense that the group running this interview is so far over our heads, that even these inserts might be a test, but a creepy children’s drawing popping up was the only time I felt the game got a little too Annabelle for my liking.
This is a tiny nitpick though. The core of this game is creepy, interesting, I even got a couple laugh out loud moments from it. It’s an easy recommendation from me, take 15 minutes and play this thing.
Since Skeeter already explained the whole game and its themes pretty thoroughly, I’m going to be a little indulgent here and say that if you play this game, and you enjoy it, I ALSO recommend you play my personal game of the year last year (as in I played it last year, it actually came out in 2022): Who’s Lila!
We got more OLD SCHOOL GRAMPHIKS! We got more BLACK AND WHITE AESTHETICS, we got more LAUGHING ONE MINUTE AND BEING DISGUSTED THE NEXT. Skeeter bought me this randomly last year and I played it non-stop for two days. You play a boy who has trouble visibly expressing emotions, and so you have to force reactions. You do this by physically dragging his face around during dialog a-la the title screen of Mario 64:
It gets much more complicated, but I would say that if you enjoyed the uncanny, but also dryly funny vibes of Assessment Examination, then I feel fairly confident you’d get a lot out of Who’s Lila as well. This game deserves a full write up, and one day I’ll get there, but for now I’ll just mention it here as a footnote of a review that Skeeter already hard-carried.
Assessment Examination reminded me of a bite-sized Who’s Lila, and that is a pretty massive compliment coming from me.
Recommend: Absolutely
Replay Percentage Chance: 5%
Time Played: 12 Minutes
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