The Town With Only You and Me
Imagine a lonely little town, with only yourself and one companion. And in fact, even your one friend there together with you in a bizarre virtual space is somewhat less than real. Play from several different perspectives as you help a girl named Aisleen navigate through, hoping to full the artificial intelligence with the vivid and original sense of persona that is her own. Can an AI learn its own set of tricks and master difficult human concepts such as humor? There's only one way to find out for sure.
You begin as the wide-eyed, blank slate of an artificial intelligence. A girl that vaguely looks familiar is bobbing up and down excitedly, asking you all sorts of questions. Do you remember my name? How are you doing? Before long, she explains to you that there are some bugs in your programming, so things may not quite be tuned to perfection. In this simulation, she explains, you may encounter some of them, and as you do, she will be able to sort them out.
A good bulk of this game is narrative and reading based, and this unveils itself as you visit different destinations. School, a museum, and the park are just some of the areas you will be dropping by, and Aisleen will readily engage in conversation with you, eager to spill out her memories and share with her newest, most novel companion. You can choose which places to visit and she will eagerly chat on about new and different experiences tied to that area each time you drop by. Of course, it turns out Aisleen still has a finite amount of time in a day, so you will need to choose wisely what you go through in search of meaningful stories and the hunt for bugs in your own coding. Never fear though - running out of time in the day carries no penalty, and you can always resume your exploration the following one.
The Town With Only You and Me is something special in the way it presents its characters, viewpoints, and story. It is at times a bit rough around the edges in the jumping from perspective to perspective and in maintaining a completely coherent thread, but I suppose that's part of uniting several different views. There are a host of different "endings" that one can try to collect in addition, but to some extent, it is a game where one defines their own objectives.
Playing The Town With Only You and Me is fairly straightforward and similar to a lot of visual novel genre games. Click on one of several different areas to visit it and uncover a bit of Aisleen's story. As you do, a small icon in the form of a page will gradually "fill" indicating how much of the narrative you have uncovered there. Occasionally, you'll encounter the odd nasty bug, causing a flash across the screen. There is an option to disable this in the game settings if you have epilepsy or simply find it eye-stressing. Other than that, the game is largely self-explanatory, so I'll leave you to explore it for yourself!
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