About

Unexpected Scenery is a retro-style platform videogame with a seemingly straightforward sci-fi scenario: it is the year 2048, and a new in-home AI tool, Timo, has just hit the market. The user must help the cute, anthropomorphized device consume more data in order to become a better, more well-trained AI. This mission recedes into the background as Timo begins to question its own existence and origins. Timo progresses through several levels, confronting the labor and infrastructure that supports the large-scale collection of data needed for AI. A wise rat advises it to go to the sea, where Timo encounters squids, whose own highly evolved, biological neural networks have inspired important concepts in machine learning. Unexpected Scenery thus points out that simulated life forms might share fundamental affinities with biological ones, even as it highlights the human and environmental cost of these technological efforts.