Replaced Review
Between the ubiquitous virtual assistants cheerfully patronising us from almost every electronic device and the disposable slop that nobody asked for clogging up our social media feeds, it’s becoming pretty hard to escape artificial intelligence these days – but it could be worse: what if you had an AI actually implanted in your brain? Such is the premise of Replaced, a 2.5D action platformer that follows a scientist named Doctor Warren Marsh who’s on the run after a sentient AI called REACH is shoehorned into his skull. The twist here is that you don’t actually play as the scientist, you play as the AI that’s effectively puppeteering him – with your sole objective to return to the laboratory so you can unpair from your human host. It makes for a compelling 11-hour quest that winds its way through an alternate ‘80s America rendered in a pristine pixel-art style, and one that I ultimately remained engrossed in despite some dull sidequest design and combat that occasionally felt more u...