Causal Loop Preview: Adventuring With an AI That Hates You

For as long as humanity has existed, we’ve looked up at the stars and wondered how we got here, and whether we were alone. In Causal Loop, the answer to the latter is obvious: no. Or, at least, we might not have been. Causal Loop follows exo-archaeologist Bale and exo-linguist Jen as they land on the planet of Tor Ulsat to study the ruins of the Tor civilization. Whatever was here is gone now. Only the monuments and the structures remain. It’d be a pretty neat set up in and of itself (we need more games about archaeology), but that’s just the start for Causal Loop, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the jump.

Causal Loop starts slowly, letting you get to know its characters, systems, and world before pushing you into the deep end of the pool that’s the actual game. See, Jen and Bale aren’t alone. They’re accompanied by Walter, an AI housed in a drone armature. It’s clear from the jump that Bale and Walter don’t get along. Bale constantly needles Walter and openly resents his presence; it’s clear that the AI is there to supervise him and keep the mission on track because Bale did something in the past that caused issues, and Walter isn’t about to let him forget it. “That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” Bale crows when his idea to open an early door by shorting it works out. “Until your contract gets terminated again…” Walter shoots back. Even letting Walter have access to his suit so he can activate Bale’s amplifier is something Bale pushes back against. They don’t like each other much, these two.

Ironically, Causal Loop wasn’t always that way. It kind of happened by accident, according to creative director Kai Moosmann. “So the first version of Walter was like, "Hey, Bale, my scans detect this and that. And that's very interesting." And Bale would be like, "Oh, thank you Walter, let's move on to the next thing." So it was always: they see something, they comment on it, they move on to the next thing. And more by accident, one of the placeholder audios for Walter was a bit snippy, and I was like, ‘That's interesting.’ That's interesting stuff right there because now we could maybe have these characters quip with each other and riff off of each other on that emotional level. And the problem was still though that Walter was not really sentient and I was not sure whether or not Walter and Bale, their relationship should be seen as something like a tool versus an actual character. And so we started experimenting and started treating Walter like an actual person, and that's how all of it happened. That's how Jen was introduced. That's how all the other characters got into the mix because now we needed a reason for Bale to dislike Walter.”

"I think one of the rules in the design document was whenever we can do Hollywood, we do Hollywood." The moderating influence is Jen, who is clearly sympathetic to Bale but would like him to try to work with Walter to make things go more smoothly. The pacing here is very deliberate, Moosman tells me. “We said right from the get-go, we didn't want to lock the player into a playground, into a jungle gym or something like that. We wanted to make sure that the story of Causal Loop and the gameplay are completely inseparable in so many ways… We wanted to make sure that people get to know these characters and that they get to care about the characters and what happens to them. I think one of the rules in the design document was whenever we can do Hollywood, we do Hollywood. That was sort of the rule for all of this, and it led to this slow opening and it was deliberate. We could have made it even slower, but we accelerated it even a little bit because at the beginning we had a scene where we showed the characters arriving on the planet and unpacking their gear, having conversations with each other, but we just wanted to push people into gameplay faster.”

And make no mistake, Causal Loop is teaching you how to play it long before it becomes obvious. Whether it’s Jen’s gentle ribbing about Bale’s speed (he’s not fast; Jen often refers to him as slowpoke), learning how to scan items in the world and determine their purpose, or having Jen and Bale synchronize their actions to open a door or switch on a bridge at the right time so the other one can cross. There’s also some really nice foreshadowing as to what you’re actually dealing with before the characters themselves find out.

As the group progresses, they gradually awaken more of the Tor technology, which culminates in the awakening of what seems to be a power source. Walter is hesitant to check the thing out because they have no idea what it is, but Bale’s full steam ahead, and… well, it goes about as well as you’d expect. Jen gets zapped away, Walter’s drone armature is destroyed, and Bale… Bale dies. When Walter brings him back, things are different. There’s a massive megastructure they didn’t notice before, alien squids are flying through the air, and there are farting plants. Yeah, no seriously. And all of that is intentional, because the developers at Mirebound knew that Tor Ulsat needed to feel alien, despite being a barren planet. What does the ecology of a planet like that look like? What still lives here? And that, in turn, influences the story. The blue goo you see everywhere eventually became something that powered the Tor’s buildings.

But the biggest difference is what that energy source did to Bale. Soon after waking up, Bale is contacted by a Tor named Nala’Tor, who informs him that the device he activated is called the Chronolith, and that Bale’s meddling has “fractured the fabric of reality, altering the very constraints that define [Bale’s] existence.” Fancy. In reality, that means that Bale can now see and interact with phase rifts, which allow him to create echoes of himself. The uses for this start small. Is that button that opens a door too far away from said door for Bale to press the button and run through it? Have an echo do it for you and waltz through once he opens the door. That bridge too far for you to cross before it vanishes? Get an echo to press the button for you and walk on over once it materializes.

The cool thing about echoes is that they’ll repeat their path over and over again until you tell them to stop… or until you run into them, which will kill them. There are some interesting existential questions there, and even Bale doesn’t quite know how to feel about them. What’s better is that everything you need to know about echoes is presented diegetically, as is almost every part of Causal Loop’s UI. Walter color-codes them for you and creates a meter that shows how much time you have while creating one – and where each echo is in their cycle.

After getting a good grasp of the basics, I’m taken to a later part of the game to kick off the training wheels. Now, there are teleporters – which, like doors and bridges, often need to be activated by an echo, and can also be used by echoes. Handy – and square keys that explode if they’re out of a socket for too long. Now, the puzzles become more complicated and more interesting. Make an echo to run down and turn on a teleporter, then stand on it when he does. It takes me to an isolated, outside area with a key. Great. I grab that sucker and head back to the teleporter, and the damn thing promptly explodes in my hands. Okay, so teleporters and keys are out. But there’s a hole in the wall, so I chuck it through there, zap back through the teleporter, and manage to slot the key into another wall slot before it explodes (though it takes me a few attempts).

To get him through, I have to synchronize my echoes, passing through the forcefield while creating my second after my first has lowered it. A couple of pit stops later, and I put it in its lock, which reveals a gravity lift that takes me up real high. A little key-throwing and another gravity lift later, and I get to what is probably my favorite puzzle in my time with Causal Loop, and the first one I play that requires two echoes. I send the first to a lower level and through a teleporter into a sectioned-off room to hit a switch that controls a forcefield. That done, I make another echo (this one’s blue) who runs around the upper level I got to from the gravity left. He needs to hit another button, but the trick is that there’s a forcefield in the way, and running into one means you’ll have a dead echo. To get him through, I have to synchronize my echoes, passing through the forcefield while creating my second after my first has lowered it. It’s not the most elaborate puzzle I play in Causal Loop, but it’s a great example of the strengths of Causal Loop’s puzzle design. When designing them, Daniel Radschun, Mirebound’s Technical Director, told me that he’s often starting from the end goal of the puzzle. “I work my way a little bit backwards, but also not, and I add separate elements step by step and really make sure that each of the elements are already working together.” Every element builds on the last.

I’ll be honest, y’all: I have an extremely poor sense of direction in both video games and real life, and I’m pretty map reliant. Causal Loop doesn’t have one, so my path through it often started with exploring a bit, finding a phase rift, and saying, “Okay, what can I do from here? What can I interact with? If I push that switch, what happens? Where does that teleporter take me?” Then, I’d work out the answers to those questions and see what I could do from there. A lot of my time with Causal Loop was spent in trial and error, learning new mechanics and seeing what did what. Sometimes, that meant doing something dumb and dying. Others, it meant looking at something like a gravity lift over a pit of lava and saying, “I wonder if I can get into that?” and learning I could in the coolest way possible. But I was always learning as I played it.

Radschun and Moosmann assured me that the full game builds these lessons up organically and reiterates the lessons you’ve learned, something I got a feel for even though I was jumping around to several points in the game. The fact that I was solving some of Causal Loop’s later puzzles without help speaks to how well it teaches you, and both developers I spoke to were proud that folks had been finishing Causal Loop’s public demo in ways they hadn’t intended.

Mirebound is rightfully proud of the way story and gameplay are inseparable in Causal Loop, but when I asked the team what they were most proud of, they told me it was Causal Loop’s optimization. Obviously, the build I played was a work-in-progress, but Moosmann told me every decision they made was with optimization in mind so Causal Loop could run on as many computers as possible. It was a ton of work, but the gamble seems to have paid off: other studios are now asking them how they did it. “If there's a wall, for example,” Moosmann told me, “and that wall is casting a shadow, and in that shadow frustum, inside that shadow frustum, there are several other objects, they're still casting a shadow even though you don't see it because that big shadow is on [top of them]. We just disable the shadows of the objects…where you don't see that they're casting a shadow. And that might sound stupid. We've been called stupid for this. ‘Unreal handles this very well.’ Yeah, up to a point, up to a couple of thousands of objects. But our worlds are made of 7, 8,000, 9,000 objects and yeah, it stacks, so it's totally worth doing that work.” The result is that as of our interview, they tell me that Causal Loop still runs at around 60 FPS on a 1080 Ti on high settings.

After spending a few hours with Causal Loop, I’m not surprised. You can see the attention to detail Mirebound is putting into everything, whether it’s the story, the characters, or the world. Causal Loop is shaping up to be a brain-bending puzzle game, and an interesting story to boot. It may not have been what I imagined when I first met Bale, Jen, and Walter, but one of the best parts of digging through the past is being surprised at what you find.