Free horror game finds a rare good use for AI generation, takes 20 minutes to beat but will give you a lifetime of existential dread and AOL nostalgia

Last Seen Online, a new free horror game I spotted from its great reviews on Steam, has managed to pull off two unlikely victories: it actually makes good use of AI-generated content and it's existentially scary on a level I've seldom experienced.

Usually, "AI-generated content disclosure" is the most efficient way to make me lose interest in a game, but two key distinctions persuaded me to give Last Seen Online a shot. For one, it's an indie horror game prominently featuring AOL instant messenger, an irresistible appeal to my exact age and preferences. Secondly, the way it utilizes AI software to produce content seems relatively innocent and genuinely clever. 

"Photoshop's generative AI is used to create the fake photographs throughout the game," the Steam page explains. "These fake photographs are created by the developer taking photos of themselves or of empty scenes and then changing the gender, age, and clothing, or inserting props or humans."

So, instead of using AI to write lame dialogue or auto-generated quests displacing human jobs, it just edits pictures of the developer to obscure and distort identities - reasonable! I still have questions about what other content that root AI may have scraped, but this seems like a pretty clean use of AI as a tool. Having taken 20 minutes to play through the game myself, I have to say the photographs are convincing enough that you'd never know they're AI-created unless you're looking very carefully, and that uncanniness kind of suits the atmosphere. 

I can also wholeheartedly guarantee you that you will not be worried about AI-generated content. I won't get into spoilers, but the story starts with the player character buying an old laptop at a garage sale and opening it to find evidence of the incredibly sad, disturbing backstory of its original owner. The ending in particular left me on the edge of a panic attack. 

Seriously, the story is one big meditation on the tragedy of youth with heady themes including abandonment, suicide, and transhumanism. In short, it's dark as all hell, and you'd be wise to exercise caution going in, particularly if your mental state is at all fragile. All that said, it packs a hell of a punch in a really short amount of time, and along with its clever, seemingly harmless use of AI, it deserves your time so long as you have the mental and emotional bandwidth for it.

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