An IFComp 2021 game. IFDB. Hmm… kind of neat to start in a low-res simulation and discover other, higher-res universes, but also very “flatland” or “The Matrix.” I don't particularly care for the tone set by the dialect, and the characters while mysterious weren't particularly memorable. The deepdream illustrations were a neat touch for this sort of thing though, and I'll grant that the whole thing was reasonably polished. I'll give “setting” and “plot” points for the overall aesthetic and the okay sense of story beats with escalating stakes.

Rated 4 of 10

+1 Novelty within the medium
+1 Interactions are fun and/or consonant with the theme
+1 No distracting bugs
+1 Polished; quality-of-life features (including hints) that enhance the experience

I wrote the following review on intfiction.org

There’s an amalgam of neat ideas in Universal Hologram. Astral projection is real, and it’s enabled by a technological breakthrough. There seems to be a weird relationship between dreaming and projecting. There’s a bleak science-fictiony world with its own history; consciousness uploading; a simulated world, then many nested simulated worlds. Illustrations that look ML-generated. And maybe a heist?

The game is structured with a set plot you’ll be carried through, with several subsections giving the reader some control of exploration. It definitely has momentum and escalating stakes. Some of the ideas above are introduced by twists in the larger plot, giving a sense of jumping between themes or even genres as the story proceeds. I found it a little disorienting. This might be exactly what the author intended! But it brought to mind Schell’s lens of the Weirdest Thing and I wonder if some of these ideas could be explored further if others were cut.

The writing seems intentionally harsh and juvenile, both the narrator’s voice and the PC and NPCs. Here’s an early possible dead-end:

You have gone too far. A negative energy being points at you and speaks the language of the stars.

You shit yourself IRL and your brain explodes.

YOU HAVE DIED. Thanks for playing!

And here’s a nearby alternative with dialogue:

When you return to the class, your instructor’s astral body is vibrating with anger.

“You’ve really pissed me off, you dumb asshole!” they say. “You’re lucky I’m nice, or I would send negative energy entities to fuck you up. You moron. You fucking idiot.”

* Sorry. Thanks for not sending negative energy entities to kill or traumatize me or whatever.
* I am back from the stars, and what I have seen will amaze you.

I’m not sure what the author is trying to achieve with this tone. It could be a nod to the later revelation that we’re living in a simulation in the “this is what everyone is like on the Internet” sense; that’s a depressing implication that the game doesn’t really explore. Or maybe it’s setting up a motivation for the protagonist to agree to weird science experiments - life is kind of terrible, why not agree to any chance of escape? Or maybe it’s supposed to be funny? That didn’t land for me, as the setting and stakes seem like they’d call for a little more gravitas. On the other hand, I could see this playing as a Simon-Pegg-esqe comedy, with the bizarre twists and turns and the characters’ intense reactions to them played for laughs. I think to make that work, more contrast between the character voices would help; the over-the-top narrator needs a timid sidekick in the player, or vice-versa.

Anyway, this example with the instructor was particularly jarring. Even in a comedy, I’d expect someone that viciously mean to be a plot-important character, but the instructor is sort of incidental.

I really like the idea of the nested simulated worlds at worse and worse resolutions. That idea by itself could carry an interesting story. An Inception or Divine Comedy journey through the layers of this simulated hell would provide a neat outer structure to fill in lots of cool worldbuilding details. As is, we sort of jump from layer 9 to layer 0 in a few paragraphs so we can collide with the even cooler idea that our matroyshka of simulations is just one of hundreds of stacks running in a sort of server farm.

Overall though, my experience of Universal Hologram was just… fine. Perhaps less than the sum of its parts, several neat bits that didn’t quite cohere into a great experience, but those bits were themselves memorable. Thanks Kit!