Who's Lila?

gamedeveloper.com:

In Who's Lila? a woman has gone missing, and Will was the last person to see her alive. Except Will only communicates using his facial expressions, so the player must tug, stretch, and shape his face, Mario 64-style, in order to communicate what they want to say as they navigate these mysterious events.

Game Developer spoke with Garage Heathen, developer of the eerie detective game, to talk about what drew them to use facial expressions to communicate throughout the game, how they taught the game to recognize so many faces, and the challenges that came from working with this kind of narrative system.

Game Developer: Who's Lila? sees players carrying on a conversation in a mystery game without saying a word. What interested you in this idea? What inspired it?

Heathen: So, the face-shifting mechanic was inspired by a mixture of things. I guess the main one was L. A. Noire with its hyper-realistic yet often uncanny facial expressions. I thought it would be fun to invert that mechanic and instead of figuring out potential liars, try the role of being liar yourself.

The second one was that one YouTube series about interrogations from JCS criminal psychology. A variety of reactions and characters they interrogated inspired the many routes of the game (and, particularly, the interrogation scene).

As for carrying out conversations without saying a word, early concepts of the game included some traditional dialogue choices (so you would have been able to choose what to say). However, I decided against that since, in my view, it would have diluted the main gameplay loop too much. 

Players reply to questioning and other characters through manipulating a face. How did you design this face-manipulation mechanic? What thoughts went into