The weirdest Steam Next Fest horror demo is only 5 minutes long, but I've been thinking about its freaky Severance vibes for days

The Steam Next Fest demo for interactive fiction game Qualia is over after only a few, uneasy minutes, but it's haunting me more than some full-sized horror games.

Created by solo dev Sydney Brafman, Qualia is a philosophical point-and-click quiz that asks you to evaluate whether two anonymous participants are human by simply rating their answers to questions as "human" or "artificial." Quickly, the demo makes it clear that the human mind isn't so exceptional; it's sometimes unnervingly impossible to distinguish a woman from a robot.

"We recommend judging the answers to each question based on: creativity, empathy, natural language use, ethical considerations, relevance," the test – issued by the fictional company intellica, which encourages me to "think happy" in a tagline – announces from inside a humming CRT monitor.

OK, sounds easy enough. Search engine results, art, and romance – by way of submissive, chatbot boyfriends – have all been getting overwhelmed by AI, so I think I've gotten good at determining what feels like it has a pulse and what comes from Midjourney's spit.

But the Qualia demo makes me question my instincts. Its CRT glows greenish and asks me the first misleading question: Is this a picture of a bicycle?

Underneath, there's a utilitarian painting of a bike splattered on black asphalt, so, yes, it is a picture representation of a bicycle. But also, no, it's not a photo of a physical bicycle.

Participant 2 determines "yes" to the question, which I find strange. But their seemingly willful defiance to subsequent questions feels completely human to me. So I'm confident they're a real person until I complete the Qualia demo, and the CRT sputters out a critical error, explaining that my "results are not satisfactory" between gibberish text and error codes.

Then I finally notice the name of the test I've been working on – the Applied Manipulation Turing study. Are the two participants' answers being manipulated? Am I? And – I know it's a game, but – how is it possible that I don't have an innate sense of what's fake?

I'll probably still be stressing over the answer until Qualia's full game releases on March 13 as studio CMY2K's debut.

Qualia definitely feels like it could be part of Severance, Apple TV Plus’s most-watched show, right?