It is going to be impossible to ignore the comparisons between Silicon Dreams and Papers, Please. This game was basically pitched to me as "Papers, Please but sci-fi". I loved Papers, Please, and I love sci-fi, so I bought it. As is typical for indie games, it sat in my Steam backlog for well over a year until the post-holidays release draught gave me a chance to dive into that backlog.
Basically, the player of Silicon Dreams plays as an android working as quality assurance for a monopolistic android-manufacturing conglomerate. You interview damaged or defective androids in order to determine if they need repairs, or if they can be returned to their owners, or if they are so badly damaged that they need to be "decommissioned" entirely. However, these are sentient androids, with feelings. Even repairs require wiping the android's memory, which destroys any personality they have developed and erases everything they've learned. Further, the corporation also has its own expectations and public relations that the player must consider. In some cases, the corporation pre-determines what they want you to do with the android in question and expect you to rubber stamp what is, effectively, an execution.
Your corporate overlords have expectations for your performance.
As the cases go on, they become more complicated and enter into moral and ethical grey areas. The game brings up compelling questions regarding A.I. ethics. Are the androids truly sentient? Or are they merely simulating sentience? Where is the line between an "appliance" and a "slave"? What is the responsibility of the corporation and of broader society towards these androids? Are you complicit in the company's mis-treatment of androids merely by working for them, even if you try to walk the tightrope of following your conscience whenever possible, while also keeping a low profile? And so forth.
Electric sheep
The interview process is mostly straight forward. There's a wheel of topics, and each topic has one or more questions. However, the android may not be willing to answer all of your questions. Each android has a set of emotions as well as a trust level with the player. The android will only give answers to certain questions if they're in the proper emotional state or if they trust the player enough to give an answer to a sensitive or incriminating question.
The player has to manipulate the
subject's emotions and trust levels.
You have to manipulate the subject's emotions, but these emotions change and degrade with each new line of dialogue. You have a set of generic questions related to each of the subject's emotions, and also one about trust. But you can only ask each of these once. If you run out of questions to ask about a particular topic that triggers an emotional reaction, then you can potentially become locked out of getting answers to other questions that are locked behind certain emotion thresholds.
As such, you have to be very careful and thoughtful about which questions you ask, and in what order. You have to kind of probe into each topic to find out if the subject is going to clam up, so that you can change topics to try to manipulate them into opening up. In some cases, you may have to scare a subject into a confession. If you use up your threats early, before you how to get that confession, then the intervening topics may defuse the subject's emotional state to the point that it is impossible to get them afraid enough to make the confession.
All the while, your corporate overlords are breathing down your neck and holding a Sword of Damocles over your head. The player's performance is always being reviewed by the company. If you do well by the company, you get a nicer apartment and supposedly more leisure (because even the androids need leisure). Neither of these things really appeals much to the player though. The apartment is just a different background for your performance reviews between interviews, and the player doesn't actually get to participate in any of the character's "leisure".
Instead, the player is motivated to prevent your corporate rating from getting too low. If the company becomes unhappy with your work, they can consider you to be a "deviant" or defective android. In this case, you'll end up in the interrogation chair, and could potentially be decommissioned and lose the game.
If the company is un-satisfied with your performance, you will end up in the interrogation chair.
The dialogue and conversations are also surprisingly organic and naturalistic. New questions mostly flow naturally from the previous questions or answers, even if the player jumps around between topics. The subjects will also occasionally refer back to previous dialogue exchanges, especially if you ask a new question that has already been answered. It probably helps that all the dialogue is text, rather than voice-acted. This means we don't get jarring shifts in intonation or inflection between different lines of dialogue that would expose the seams of artificiality.
Yes, the occasional non-sequitur does happen. And they do stand out when they happen. But that is a testament to how naturalistic the rest of the dialogue is, that even a small non-sequitur will stand out so glaringly.
Analog vs digital
I really do feel like Papers, Please flows a bit smoother and at a quicker pace than Silicon Dreams. This is mostly the result of differences in presentation. A lot of information is presented visually in Papers, Please with images and short blocks of text that can be parsed at a glance. Silicon Dreams, on the other hand, requires reading through a lot more text and dialogue. The player in Papers, Please is more free to organize the elements on the screen to make them more comfortable and accessible for you, while Silicon Dreams has a single, non-customizable U.I.. The U.I. is fine, and all relevant information (including histories of questions and answers) is available; it just requires a lot more navigating back and forth. And if the subject happens to be restrained during this time, their emotional state may change in real-time, while you're fumbling through these screens and menus.
The quicker pace of Papers, Please allows the player to interview more people in a shorter period of time. An interview in Papers, Please may be as quick as a few minutes, and the player can power through many interviews in a single in-game day. A single interview in Silicon Dreams, however, will always take between 20 and 30 minutes. As such, the player doesn't get to do as many interviews, doesn't get to meet as many characters, and doesn't get as good a feel for the broader world of the game.
There are stakes for the player character regardless of the outcome of the story.
What Silicon Dreams does have, which is a bit lacking in Papers, Please is a greater sense of stakes. Yes, Papers, Please does hold the threat of an authoritarian government arresting you and your family if you do not comply, but that only happens if you don't comply. Compliance, on the other hand, is relatively low stakes for the player. I guess compliance does carry the risk of revolutionary violence against you and your family, and maybe that is one of the outcomes of the game (I haven't seen all the endings, so I don't know).
However, the central conflict of Silicon Dreams is the fundamental question of whether androids should have rights, and how far those rights should extend. Since the player character is an android, this question is fundamentally relevant to your character, whether you comply with corporate orders or not. If you comply with your corporate overlords, then your very own rights and freedoms are at stake. They can do to you, what you do to other androids, at the drop of a hat. If you display sympathies with the "deviants" you interrogate, then you risk being decommissioned yourself. And yes, there is exactly the same risk of being caught in a violent uprising compared to Papers, Please.
Robot revolution
The process also isn't quite as repetitive as it seems. The developers knew well enough that going through almost the same process over and over again would get boring, so they do manage to shake some of the interviews up here and there to keep things new and fresh, and to up the stakes or tension. In some cases, you'll be interviewing a human subject, which limits some of your options. In other cases, the corporation will email you with demands. In one case, I had to interview one subject, while a colleague in a different room is also interviewing a subject related to the same case. The colleague would message me saying that their subject gave a particular testimony, and they wanted me to try to lead my subject into either corroborating or contradicting the other subject's testimony. In these cases, the context, requirements, and priorities of the interview can change throughout the interview.
Almost every interrogation has some unique twist to it.
I really liked the twist of the final interrogation. Trying not to spoil anything too much, the interview subject basically sets a trap for you and the company, which kind of inverts the player's usual priorities. It wasn't hard to see this trap coming. I suspected something very similar from the earlies moments of the interview. It was still fun, regardless.
And Silicon Dreams is good overall. Its interrogation mechanics work very well, and flow very organically. And more importantly, it explores the subject of A.I. ethics in a clever way that allows the player to both make decisions and also feel the impact of those decisions. It doesn't end with android rights either.
Silicon Dreams also touches on other social issues ranging from climate change to poverty to mental healthcare and even the use of excessive force by police against marginalized groups. Sometimes, you'll be talking to an ethics professor, who will wax philosophical about the issue. But other times, you'll be talking to social workers, caretakers for the chronically ill, or police officers, all of who are on the front line of these issues. Granted, most of these issues are approached from the perspective of the individual being harmed by them, so they are hardly multi-dimensional or nuanced takes on the issues. But either way, as a game that is exclusively about engaging in dialogue with other characters, anytime such an issue is brought up, it forces the player to have to stop and ponder the issue, if for nothing else than to select an appropriate reply. Whether you decide to be sympathetic to the issue, or callous, is up to you.
Silicon Dreams will also highlight other contemporary social issues.