Who's Lila

Who's Lila is a point-and-click adventure with one of the strangest interaction systems in recent indie gaming. Instead of choosing dialogue options from a menu, you control the character's face manually — moving the parts of his face into expressions you think fit the conversation. A specifically trained neural network reads the resulting expression, classifies the emotion, and uses that classification to drive the dialogue. Your face is the menu.

The premise is appropriately uneasy. You play William, a young man whose life has never been easy. Today is special — a girl named Tanya Kennedy has gone missing, and the only thing William's friends know is that he was the last person to see her. Will you have William remain secretive and act as though nothing happened, or let true emotions show through his mask? The neural-network mechanic makes that choice strangely physical.

The world around the central mystery is dense and atmospheric. A gritty ditherpunk visual style, dreamlike landscapes, surreal architecture, steam-filled factory interiors, and David Lynch-inspired imagery of the industrial and the mundane all feed into a setting that feels deliberately liminal. The quote from Lynch on the store page — 'Sometimes there is fear in the unknown, but we are good detectives and we have to know everything' — frames the whole project.

Fifteen endings and choice-driven gameplay extend the runtime past the surface story. Six-plus hours of gameplay, Steam achievements, unlockable palettes for the ditherpunk visuals, and over fifty unique soundtrack pieces written specifically for the game all reward players who want to explore every possible turn of events. Who's Lila is one of those projects where the mechanic and the story support each other so thoroughly that pulling them apart would diminish both.