Who’s Lila’s 1-bit Horror Forces You To Adjust Your Facial Expressions On The Fly
When I first imagined finding a dead dog at the steps of my apartment, the facial muscles behind my cheekbones couldn’t help but tense up, pulling up the corners of my mouth into an awful smile. It was a struggle to keep them down, to force my face into a more sombre, acceptable look—but then the moment had passed. I took too much time for this little experiment and, luckily, had this interaction happen in my bathroom, because among polite company, things would be pretty awkward, really. I sighed and decided to give this another go.
“If I see a dead dog on the street, I’ll make a face like this.”
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I tugged at my eyebrows and lips till I looked appropriately ‘sad’, and then moved on to my next facial exercise—a routine that I have to rehearse every morning before heading out to meet anyone.
That’s the gist of Who’s Lila, a point-and-click game about directing the flow of conversations not by choosing dialogue options, but by presenting the right facial expressions to people: happy, sad, anger, disgust and more. To do so means pulling and nudging at the various muscles on your face—such as your eyebrows, your nose, your lips and even your chin—to contort your face into a hopefully natural expression. A friendly facade, for instance, is mostly straightforward enough, as a gentle smile would usually do the trick. But more complex expressions usually require a bit more finesse; a look of disgust, for instance, will need you to scrunch up your eyebrows, frown a little, and lift your upper lip to reveal just a little bit of teeth. It’s a gimmick that transforms an instinct we barely think much about into an elaborate puzzle. This has made me hyper aware of how
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