In the sprawling landscape of indie horror, few games have challenged the very grammar of player agency as profoundly as Who’s Lila? Developed by garage, the game masquerades as a point-and-click detective thriller, but its true genius lies in its interrogation of identity through a radical mechanic: real-time facial expression manipulation. Examining the specific Build 20220720 —a release that sits at the precipice of the game’s 1.0 completion—reveals the definitive crystallization of the game’s core thesis: that consciousness is not a fixed state, but a performance we are doomed to fail. The Mechanical Unconscious Unlike traditional adventure games where dialogue trees offer discrete, pre-written emotional responses, Build 20220720 forces the player to manually click and drag the protagonist’s face into an expression. To say you are “sad,” you must physically contort a polygonal mask until the corners of the mouth droop. To lie, you must fight the natural gravity of the face, holding a smile that your cursor does not believe in.
The build asks a simple question: If you have to manually construct every emotion you show the world, are you even real? The answer, whispered through the lag and the glitches, is a terrifying no . But the consolation, the game suggests, is that no one else is, either. We are all just Build 20220720—unpolished, glitchy, and desperately trying to look human before the timer runs out.
In a pivotal scene unique to the pacing of Build 20220720, Thomas looks into a bathroom mirror. Unlike later builds where the reflection perfectly mimics your mouse movements, this version introduces a 0.5-second delay. You smile. The reflection frowns. You look away. The reflection keeps staring. This moment encapsulates the game’s horror: the self is not a unified subject but a doppelgänger we are constantly trying to catch up to. Most games punish failure with a reload screen. Who’s Lila? punishes success. If you manage to perfectly sculpt a “normal” expression for every question—a cheerful smirk for “How are you?” a furrowed brow for “Are you hiding something?”—the game ends anticlimactically. The police thank you for your cooperation. You go home. The credits roll. You have performed humanity so well that you have erased the mystery.
In this specific build, the facial manipulation physics feel noticeably heavier and more resistant than in earlier demos. This is not a bug; it is the point. refines what I call the “lag of authenticity.” When detective William asks where you were on the night of the disappearance, you have approximately two seconds to sculpt a response. The result is a panicked, twitching grimace. The game recognizes that in real life, we do not choose emotions so much as we arrive at them too late. By making the interface deliberately clunky, the build argues that self-presentation is always a laggy, compromised process. The Double Narrative: Detective vs. Metaphor On its surface, Who’s Lila? is a cyberpunk-noir mystery about finding a missing woman named Lila. You play as Thomas, a quiet tech specialist with a blank affect. However, Build 20220720 introduces subtle environmental glitches that break the fourth wall more aggressively than previous versions. Posters in the background flicker to reveal the game’s own development UI. The save menu occasionally shows the wrong character model.
These glitches serve as the build’s thesis statement: the search for Lila is the search for the authentic self. Lila is not just a person; she is the real expression behind the mask. Every other character in the game wears a socially acceptable face—the cynical cop, the grieving mother, the smug artist. Thomas’s inability to emote naturally makes him the only honest person in the room, even as everyone suspects him of lying.