who's lila? (game)

rating

starstarstarstar_halfstar

date

01 january 2026

genre

psychological horror, point-and-click adventure

creator

garage heathen

i just don't think i was either smart or obsessed enough to fully comprehend what's happening here.

who's lila is a point-and-click horror game (except when it's not point-and-click) with a very striking 1-bit visual style (and once again, like mouthwashing, a very cool dithering effect), a face-contortion dialogue system (more on that in a second) and a lot of branching paths that help you slowly unravel what the hell is going on. on the surface, you play as high school student william, who has, as he puts it, "difficulty expressing emotions". on top of that, he's part of a weird cult, and possibly involved in the disappearance of a fellow student. and maybe possessed.

this is an extremely choice-heavy game. the choices on the one hand emerge from where you decide to go, what items you interact with, that kind of thing. on the other hand, there's conversations with other characters that branch the paths of the game. the dialogue system is very unique and what first drew me towards playing who's lila. instead of choosing dialogue, you choose a facial expression to react with. there's a total of 6 expressions and the choice happens by actively moving certain grab-points on the protagonist's face, which is always present on the right side of the game window in a timed mini-game. in some situations, the character actively works against the expression you want to make, especially in high stress situations, making it difficult to convey the reaction you want to show. it's a bit frustrating to deal with at times, but conceptually i liked it a lot.

the game throws you into it with a minimal set of tasks to guide you in a specific way, but otherwise a total lack of context. a single playthrough of who's lila will take you maybe 15-30 minutes and the first few times around, some conversations and situations will leave you baffled. it's on you to loop through over and over until you can piece together the wider story here and even then, it's convoluted and complicated (3 hours in, i had several wikipedia articles on the study of the concept of human consciousness open to try to follow what the game was telling me). it's a rabbit hole you have to want to engage with, containing some arg elements like poking around in the game's files and visiting real websites to get more clues to continue. all of this is extremely well done, but at some point i personally hit a wall, where i had a general understanding of what's broadly going on without having explored every single of the 15+ endings and was satisfied enough to end my time with the game. there's a 7 hour explainer video on youtube that will probably go 5 layers deeper into the concepts at play here, but i was fine to stop at that point.

there's a healthy dose of lynch inspiration here, i can tell that much (as the blue velvet poster in one of the game's environments helpfully gives away), even to the point that a very strikingly presented murder scene looks straight up like it came from a lynch film. there's a very oppressive atmosphere throughout, reinforced by the good minimal music, the fact that the art style makes all environments look very bleak and the aforementioned facial contortions of the protagonist always taking up half the screen, uncomfortably staring back at you.

check this out if you're willing to dig into something more complicated that doesn't spoon-feed you a resolution or explanation. it's worth your time, even if it leaves you a bit like you bounced off it and didn't fully understand everything it tried to convey, as it left me.