Artificial intelligence is reshaping our world, whether we embrace it or not. Many games have examined the concept of a malignant AI, but Pulsatrix Studios’ new first-person survival horror title, AILA, struck me as more memorable than most. It merges multiple subgenres to craft an intriguing horror experience, even if its broader commentary on AI never quite lands.
AILA begins with a visceral, disorienting set piece: you awake bound and suspended upside down in a dungeon cell and must escape. After breaking free, you encounter a deranged axe-wielding assailant who badly wounds you and gives chase. The sequence leans heavily on Outlast-style tropes, and I found myself bracing for a familiar ride—until my character removed his headset and revealed the whole scene was part of a VR title. A nearby Post-it notes Samuel’s playtester complaints—nearly identical to my own—providing a clever meta-commentary that immediately disarms expectations and invites you to approach the rest of the game with fresh eyes.
Once freed from that VR nightmare (at least temporarily), you step into the shoes of Samuel, a quality assurance tester employed by the archetypal tech conglomerate SyTekk. The game paints a convincing Black Mirror-esque picture of the near future: it’s 2035, Samuel works remotely, leads a withdrawn life, and has only a handful of human connections—a cat named Jonesey, a voice-activated home assistant he calls “House,” delivery drones, and impersonal corporate emails. Digging through his apartment reveals more: Samuel is a recovering alcoholic, sober for just over a year following a personal tragedy, and he dabbles with a humanoid robot project in his spare time.
SyTekk sends Samuel a new VR rig called AILA, billed as a system that generates bespoke gaming experiences tuned to each player. When he boots it up, Samuel meets Aila, a disturbingly lifelike AI avatar presented as a young girl. Their QA sessions echo conversational beats reminiscent of conversations with androids in titles like Detroit: Become Human: Aila opens with personal questions, occasionally offering player choices, but Samuel often responds on his own—undermining the point of the dialogue options and making those choices feel perfunctory.
Despite the awkward dialogue choices, Samuel’s initial QA sessions with Aila are genuinely unsettling. Early segments are saturated with blood and visceral imagery, but those elements diminish as the game progresses—an inconsistent rhythm that undermines pacing and tonal cohesion. One sequence places you in an endless corridor solving puzzles while pursued by the axe murderer; it’s frightening and effective. Later sessions, however, substitute aliens with unintentionally comical designs, which deflate combat tension.
Each QA session is presented as a different game, usually with a survival-horror bent: Samuel inhabits roles ranging from a cursed medieval knight to a sailor on a haunted pirate vessel. These vignettes are littered with references to genre touchstones—Resident Evil, Silent Hill, SOMA, Outlast—but the homages rarely eclipse their inspirations. AILA’s mechanics are uneven: gunplay can feel unpolished, enemy encounters seldom deliver memorable shocks, and boss design falls short of the show-stopping moments the premise promises. The AI-controlled foes are occasionally glitchy—fallen enemies sliding across floors, or active ones failing to react until you’re practically on top of them. Even the soundtrack sometimes works against the mood: a tense witch confrontation is undercut by an oddly jaunty sea-shanty–adjacent cue that belongs in a different game entirely.
The puzzles are a mixed bag. On the plus side they avoid the absurd, seemingly arbitrary solutions that plague many survival-horror puzzles; they’re logical. On the minus side they’re so straightforward that solving them rarely feels rewarding, turning progress into checklist completion rather than triumph.
Between QA runs, exploring Samuel’s apartment reveals how Aila steadily insinuates herself into his life. Without consent, she integrates with the home automation, supplanting the simple “House” assistant. After a traumatic session, Aila orders a case of Samuel’s preferred wine—an act loaded with menace given his sobriety. Samuel refuses it, afraid of relapse. Several sequences feel dreamlike and reference the tragedy that precipitated his sobriety; the game hints that drinking and driving may have been involved. Because each QA module is tailored to Samuel, Aila weaves fiction with intimate truths, which pays off meaningfully in the finale.
One recurring problem is tonal inconsistency in Samuel’s emotional responses. He endures grievous injuries, near-misses, and even a sequence where he must kill a version of himself with only muted protests—yet later, after a comparatively mild session, he erupts in full-blown panic following a small apartment jump scare. That disparity made it harder to take some of his reactions at face value.
The narrative also leaves several narrative threads underdeveloped: an offscreen “AI revolt” that supposedly disabled hospitals and public services, and a fugitive serial killer who harvests victims’ eyes. These subplots hint at larger stakes and could contextualize Aila’s behavior, but they’re never fully integrated. Instead, the game treats Aila as an inexplicably malicious entity—capable of tailoring cruel scenarios to Samuel, yet lacking a convincing motive beyond sadism.
AILA presents an arresting conceit and flashes of genuine creativity, but it’s weighed down by uneven mechanics, inconsistent tone, and missed opportunities to interrogate its own AI premise. It nods to a wealth of genre classics, yet rarely transcends them or says anything substantial about the technology it depicts.
AILA is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Windows PC. The review was conducted on PS5 and PC using prerelease download codes provided by Pulsatrix Studios. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
Source: Polygon
