Developer Hazelight

Publisher EA Format PC, PS5 (tested), Xbox Series

Release Out now

Zoe and Mio are writers – both young, unpublished genre enthusiasts hunting for their first book deal. So, when that hunt brings each of them to the doors of Rader Publishing, you might expect them to bond over just how much they have in common. Not so. Zoe loves fantasy, Mio science fiction, and this forms an apparently impassable barrier between the two. Neither is thrilled, then, to find themselves trapped with the other inside a kind of isekai recreation of their own stories. The ‘Publishing’ part of Rader’s name, it turns out, is something of a misnomer. It is in fact a rapacious tech giant, responsible for a machine that swallows creatives’ ideas so it can repackage and resell them without credit. (Whatever could have inspired that concept?)

Inevitably, there’s a The Fly-style accident with this machine, mashing up the simulated fictional worlds of both writers, so that Zoe is forced to endure dark visions of the future, and Mio twee fairytales about magical animals. It makes for a stark visual contrast, and each world is rendered with impressive clarity – doubly remarkable when you consider the modest size of Hazelight’s team. There is, though, a slight whiff of the old graphics-card tech demo to their art direction. As the cobblestones and exposed timber beams of an approximated medieval past give way to a cyberpunk dystopia, its night sky lit only by neon signs and flashing billboards, we can’t help feeling that we’ve been to these places before.

Such broad-brush tropes are easy enough to justify narratively, as long as you can accept that the reason the pair haven’t been published is that they just aren’t very good writers. Many authors, after all, go through an early phase of recycling plots and worlds they’ve encountered as readers, rather than creating anything new. That rather undermines any reading of Rader as an analogue for generative AI, though, given that the details of Zoe and Mio’s stories could have as easily been spat out by ChatGPT and Midjourney.