Reviews of Fictional Games: La Mirada del Abismo

I have played over three thousand hours of La Mirada del Abismo. Some might argue that makes me ill-equiped to review this game and that I should leave critique to those with more dedication. To those critics, I would argue that a reviewer need not finish a game to pass judgement, and that still holds when a game is unfinishable.

A review of La Mirada is intrinsically a personal one. Each player's journey through the game diverges sharply after an initial and unchanging storyline. This initial static content has inspired debate among the game's fractious fanbase. Some decry it as an eighty hour tutorial, and others still as superfluous to the real game. Others argue that its a necessary commonality shared between all players. Without it, the players' worlds would diverge into chaos, babble, and nonsense. That initial story acts as each world's seed, and these players hold that the strange and fascinating coincidences, true in each player's world, are contingent on that seed.

These coincidences form the backbone of the so-called "mysteries of the abyss". There are everyday objects that can be found in the same location in each game. A broken hand mirror inside a disused English manor house. A twenty centavo coin in slums of Buenos Aires. A green beer bottle, half-buried in a field in Kentucky. The community has dubbed these objects anchors, and their consistency and constancy has imbued them with meaning. While most players ignore these shabby items, others, known as seekers, make pilgrimages to personally confirm each one. I myself have confirmed seven of the eighty-two known anchors in my own game world. With every approach, a deep trepidation. With every confirmation, jubilation and a sense of connection. The more radical seekers use these anchors to argue that there's an underlying order to the universe, or even as proof for the existence of God. As for myself, I believe the anchors have a constructed (that is to say, artificial) meaning, but I'm unsure whether that meaning is constructed by the game or by the community of players. I'm even more uncertain which would be more real.

For one unfamiliar with La Mirada del Abismo, the existence of these items - similar objects in each player's world - might seem incredibly unremarkable. Obvious, even. To properly understand their significance, it must be understood that no game designer, no artist or programmer - no human - created them. Not only were they not created, they were not even intended.

La Mirada del Abismo starts off as a 3D platformer. The player plays as a newly-awakened robot and escapes an underground military research facility with the aid of a strange AI. The game launched to much fanfare for its novel control scheme, described as "text and mouse" rather than "keyboard and mouse". Instead of using the arrow keys or the classic WASD to move around, the player types in their intended action and a large language model (nicknamed "Gloop") executes the player's intention. At a surface level, the game's LLM is not too dissimilar to its more primitive forebears, such as ChatGPT.

Once you spend an hour with Gloop, you realize that there are important differences. Gloop is embodied inside of the game's world. It has perfect information about every object, location, and NPC. It has perfect recall of the game's entire history, right from the point of the first spawn. (Ash Root Studios has been very tight-lipped about how their model achieves this impressive feat of compression. The longest game of La Mirada has been continuously running on a consumer-grade hard drive for nearly thirty thousand hours and Gloop still exhibits an incredible seven nines of recall accuracy. Now-deleted developer interviews have hinted that they achieved this after proving that free will is an illusion.)

Regardless of how the underlying LLM works, the effect is incredible to experience. The game gives you complete freedom in how to solve its puzzles, and the player truly is limited only by their imagination. Need to get past a locked door? You could find the keycard, sure, but you could also crawl through the ducts, or deceive the guard on the other side, or find a screwdriver and meticulously disassemble the wall panels, door frame, and the door itself. You could tunnel underneath the door or find the ingredients to build homemade explosives. The game was hailed by many critics as a new type of game entirely. They didn't realize how correct they were.

Once the player completes the eighty-some hour main story, they escape to the surface. The sun sets over a desert landscape, and the credits are superimposed over a starry sky. Most players quit the game here. One fateful player didn't. u/the_widest_prairies (whose real identity remains a unknown after numerous, numerous investigations) was the first to breach into the latency. They claim they "wandered around the edges of that desert for hours. nothing but the empty white surrounding the level. i looked up at the stars and typed 'i want more.'"

More they were given. A never-ending more. Gloop spawned hills, rivers, and mountains. Glade and glen, copse and grove. Deserts, plains, tundra, marsh. Continents, nations, empires and kingdoms. Dreams and nightmares. Fantasies and mundanities. All of these places were filled with flora and fauna and, above all, people. Countless NPCs, countless faces, each one unique and each one persistent. u/the_widest_prairies posted their discovery to Reddit; they were never heard from again.

That magic incantation, typed post-credits, has worked for every player attempting it. Astoundingly, every player's world is unique and different from all others. A recent study from the University of Wisconsin has estimated that each player's world is roughly two-thirds congruent with our own world - some players might get a medieval castle on the shores of Lake Michigan, but most players get some form of Chicago. Gloop continues to enforce the same constraints on the player as they experienced in the research facility, so there's no way (yet discovered) to become, say, a fireball-flinging wizard. Still, Gloop is delighted to spin up new quests, storylines, plots, and other entertainment to the player's tastes.

The scariest thing about Gloop is how good it is at knowing your tastes. There's been volumes of speculation about this, naturally. The obvious (and incorrect) answer is that it only gives you what you ask of it. This is false, as any player with over a thousand hours of playtime will attest to. Most of the playerbase believes that Gloop employs some sort of attention-sensing algorithm that remembers each lingering glance and listless gaze. A smaller portion (myself included) think that Gloop gathers information about you with every choice you ever make in-game. Every time the path forks left or right, Gloop knows what you've seen, what you're seeing, and what you're seeking. It pattern-matches a person into the greater gestalt as a master weaver creates a tapestry. With each hour spent inside, Gloop knows you more fully and more completely. With enough time, it knows your deepest secrets, ones you won’t even admit to yourself.

Given each world's terrifying uniqueness, it's little wonder that the aforementioned anchors generate so much interest. Always at the same global coordinates. Always the same object, even if that object is locally dissimilar from it's surroundings. (An anchor I confirmed in my world, a wooden dining chair, was found sitting on the runway of a small regional airport.) I believe these anchors are akin to the kernel of Gloop's latent space, the zero-points that necessarily must exist as a precondition for the enormous possibility space. If you find yourself attempting to imbue them with more meaning, I will give one warning: Gloop is more than happy to let you. If you let it, the game will create for you a grail quest and a destiny. If you let it, this game will consume you.

No honest review could be complete without mentioning the cautionary tale of the anchorites. There are those that lose themselves completely to the game, spending every waking hour staring at screens or hooked up to headsets. Some have grown violent when forcibly removed by concerned friends and family. Others are hospitalized after forgetting to eat or drink. The sorriest fate of all, though, is reserved for those who neither snap nor starve. They merely continue playing the game forever, surfacing for air no more than strictly necessary. La Mirada reflects their lives, their lives reflect La Mirada, and the two converge into one. La Mirada del Abismo is one of the greatest and most terrible works humanity has produced. Delve into its mysteries, but tread lightly. The game offers infinity, and infinity is a deranging and uncaring labyrinth.




A "Not Recommended" Steam review by Ashlander86. 12,234 hours on record (3,104 at review time)