Heart Of The Machine

25 Mar 2026 By Sin Vega Bits

I am The Thing from the Tower

Chaos ex machina

More of you need to be playing narrative strategy-RPG Heart Of The Machine. I don't care that you'll enjoy it. I just want to see what you do.

I love this kind of game. Take your wiki and your tiers and your meta and shove it up your tedious spod arse. Heart Of The Machine wants you to explore, to imagine, to play with its premise: that you're an (actual) artificial intelligence, newly sentient, in a far future dystopian city. Now what? What kind of being are you? What should you do about the world?

Don't look it up. Figure out who you are, you goddamn coward. Make a decision. Be someone.

A monochrome, humanoid robot and a human silhoutte stand either side of a text box offering two player responses: "Accept the Nuclear Device", and "Ignore her and scan the facility". Less relevant is the event itself, detailing the human, a manager, offering the player a nuclear bomb and asking them to use it on a third party. — You have been blanked. But have you been "offering a nuclear bomb" blanked?

This is not a game to win or (ugh) "beat", but to play along with its many choose-your-own-adventure style events. Its earliest paths can diverge pretty widely, offering choices in story events like "Ask to see her wares" vs "Murder her for some reason", at least unless you look further into the option to "Start Therapy". There are wonderfully evocative choices like "Befriend The Creatures", "Design Something Horrifying", and upon returning to a repeat event,