1000xResist Studio’s next indie game asks the question: Can you convince an AI that it’s not human?

If you’re confused about how many AI chatbots are like humans, there’s an upcoming indie game with your name on it.

During the Triple-i Initiative showcase in early April, Sunset Visitor Studio (creators of 1000xResist) revealed its next title, Prove You’re Human. The narrative game puts players in the role of someone trying to convince an AI that they’re not human — and with a creative team full of former performers, the game will get very existential from there.

The trailer is evocative but sparse on details, which is appropriate at first glance for a game that doesn’t yet have a release date. Given the indie success of Sunset Visitor’s debut title about cloning and character, 1000xResist, expectations are high for another cerebral narrative. As the first game under the new publishing arm of Black Tabby Games (makers of indie Slay the Princess), the game raises a lot of promise.

In a conversation with Sunset Visitor founder Remy Siu, I delved into proving you’re human, asking the crucial question: What even is this game? And while they’re not revealing many details at the moment or even hinting at a release date, we’ve talked a lot about how a sci-fi game inspired by the hit TV show Severance and the rise of generative AI speaks to the moment we’re all living in – where people who chat with ChatGPT are succumbing to AI psychosis and AI advocates claim that the technological singularity of true AI is just around the corner.

“Prove You’re Human” is a game where an AI dares you to dream that it’s human, and you’re hired to put it in its place, Seo said. “And by (I mean) you are the player who underwent surgery to split his consciousness into two parts: one is a virtual consciousness, and then what we used to call the physical other, your flesh body that continues to exist outside doing things.”

See what I meant about breaking up?

As with the show, Prove You’re Human uses these layers of existence to comment on our selves at work versus our selves in the outside world. As you would expect from a group of past performers, there is pomp in this dichotomy, with your self in the digital work (controlled by the player, rendered in 3D), occasionally sent messages from your outer self, and captured in full-motion video. (This is the real-life video we see in the trailer.)

“All of her dreams have to come true, and you’re the version of yourself that’s now trapped here doing all the work,” said Abby Howard, co-founder of Black Tabby Games and the new Black Tabby Publishing arm.

“It’s a test of our relationship with work in 2026. If you worked at a company now, would you who spent time in the office enjoy the fruits of that labor?” said Tony Howard Arias, also co-founder of Black Tabby Games.

And in another reflection of our current reality specifically Artificial intelligence in games in 2026I asked whether generative AI tools are used in Prove Your Human development, either to create code or assets. “It’s definitely not game over,” Seo said, lamenting that AI tools are being used for mundane things like Google searches. Howard confirmed that they do not handle or use these tools at Black Tabby Games.

“We make a conscious effort not to get involved in this matter wherever possible,” Howard Arias said. “But how come you don’t see the automated Google summary at the top of the search results?”

Dealing with artificial intelligence – and choosing what is real

As a narrative game, players will spend time in Prove You’re Human interacting with an AI named Mesa, hoping to convince her that she’s not human. Conveniently, there’s another mechanism players will use to interact with the world around them: raise a CAPTCHA window and check off the unreal squares. Through this tool—again, Siu was vague to hide story details—players will engage with the concept of what is real and what is not real. Like other aspects of the game, there is a deep philosophy behind using a tool to declare the truth of things.

“Every CAPTCHA asks the player to commit an act of violence. You have to choose whether something is a thing or not,” Seo said. “This kind of thing has been revealed in these conversations with AI.”

Indie games have dealt with the moral quandary of seemingly simple binary decisions leading to disastrous consequences. In the popular 2014 game Papers, Please, players served as a low-level border patrol agent who agreed or denied entry, choosing whether to save your job at the cost of condemning people to a terrible fate. It appears that Prove You’re Human will use CAPTCHAs to similarly challenge players to make tough choices.

“One of the first CAPTCHAs that Remy showed us was as he showed a picture of a group of soldiers holding weapons, and it said ‘Select all boxes with weapons in them,’” Howard Arias said. “So the context provided is an unanswerable question that puts you in a complex situation that causes some anxiety.”

I pointed out that using CAPTCHAs would likely date this game as belonging to a certain era, and Siu agreed that a decade from now we might be using different, more sophisticated verification tools. But he is optimistic that the game will look like it came from the year 2026. He noted that art is defined by the contexts and time in which it is made.

“I want people 10 years from now, when they play this game, to understand what we were thinking at this particular time,” Seo said.

Why are indie games the best way to think about AI?

Similar to Prove You’re Human’s takeaways from our current concerns about AI in 2026, Sunset Visitor’s first game, 1000xResist, is a product of 2020. It was developed during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — in fact, Seo says it wouldn’t exist without the pandemic, as themes of isolation and connection at the start of the pandemic found their way into the game.

وبعد نصف عقد من الزمن، حول العالم تركيزه إلى عصر جديد من الذكاء الاصطناعي الأكثر ذكاءً، وعدم المساواة المالية، وقضايا العمل. “For us at the studio, we always try to make games that accompany you throughout life, and we also relate easily to the world in which they are created,” Seo said.

While Prove You’re Human deals with our current reality, telling a story about AI cloaks the game in the grand tradition of science fiction and its forays into AI. Seo says there’s a tension in adding to a proud tradition of theoretical threads about intelligent entities we might one day create during our lifetime in 2026 while realizing them.

Science fiction has a lot of overlap between artificial intelligence, personality, and labor concerns, from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to Isaac Asimov’s iRobot to Severance. Siu hinted that there are “things that Severance left on the table that I would like to address in this game.” While there are similarities to that show, he added that Sunset Visitor was more influenced by the animated series Pantheon, which addresses consciousness uploaded to digital networks and the value of work created by an artificial being.

“Games as an artistic medium raise questions about the nature of the self and awareness of the immersive way we interact with and embody character,” said Howard Arias.

The most popular science fiction video games have been titles from large-scale AAA developers such as the Mass Effect and Dead Space franchises, which contain world-building elements and story beats common to science fiction subgenres (space opera and space horror, respectively). Prove You’re Human is an indie game designed on a smaller scale with a much more philosophical underpinning. Siu said indie games have more scope to investigate themes and gameplay outside of the mainstream, allowing their developers to go above and beyond in ways that can cater to an audience dissatisfied with games from AAA developers.

“I think this game is, first and foremost, for fans who are troubled by the narrative, people who really want to see how the narrative is played out, unhindered by a lot of concerns that bigger developers might have,” Seo said. “We hope this creates something you can’t get anywhere else.”

Sunset Visitor’s first release, 1000xResist, found an audience of players who engaged with it with depth and nuance to a degree that surprised Siu, bucking the assumption that they would only get such attention from film fans or traditional fine and performing arts spaces.

In the development of Prove Yourself Human, he is more optimistic about the levels of complexity that players will deal with. This desire for deeper games has led to Sunset Visitor’s alignment with Black Tabby Publishing, and Siu has pointed to the value of Abby and Tony, makers of the hit narrative game Slay the Princess, collaborating on his studio’s next game from a very early stage of development.

“The only way to foster this kind of love of literature in the public, the only way to grow the medium, is to do difficult work,” Howard Arias said.