With Cinematic Flair, a Sentient A.I. Learns Its Limits

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.

Supported by

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Video Game Review

With Cinematic Flair, a Sentient A.I. Learns Its Limits

For better or worse, the retro Replaced feels like a Sega Genesis game made with current technology.

Listen

· 5:16 min

Share full article

The side-scrolling camera, which shifts the emphasis between foreground and background, is a highlight throughout Replaced.

Credit...

Sad Cat Studios

By

Christopher Byrd

April 28, 2026,

5:04 a.m. ET

Replaced

See more of our coverage in your search results.

Encuentra más de nuestra cobertura en los resultados de búsqueda.

Add The New York Times on Google

Agrega The New York Times en Google

Fade in with the dark synth tunes. Cue the

DeLorean-ish flying car

with the winged doors, the body splicers, the street gang and the crooked cops. Spotlight the nefarious multinational corporation pulling the strings. Arrange these elements around a ghostly buddy story about a sentient A.I. and its creator. Punctuate the completion of story beats with the sound of a cassette being slotted into a machine.

The cyberpunk video game Replaced does its best to court its audience’s late-20th-century nostalgia for that era’s sci-fi visions of the future. It feels, for better or worse, like a Sega Genesis game made with current technology.

Set in an alternative version of the 1980s, in a United States still recovering from botched nuclear weapons testing, the game opens from the perspective of R.E.A.C.H., an A.I. studying its creator’s erratic behavior. Hooked up to its system via a neuro-link helmet is Warren Marsh, who caustically disregards the system’s health warnings about his prolonged immersion. Frantically, he keeps working until an explosion hurls him to the floor.

When Marsh stirs, it is under the direction of a shocked Reach, which finds itself in the scientist’s body. (How Reach comes to understand itself as separate from R.E.A.C.H. forms the linchpin of the plot.) Alarmed that it can’t make contact with its host, the A.I. sets out to find another neuro terminal to restore Marsh to his body.

While running through the burning facility, Reach sees some police officers in the distance and, with ironic naïveté, reasons that they should be informed of Marsh’s accident. Reach is soon disabused of this notion after it watches a police officer execute an unarmed person and then turn to shoot in its direction.

A narrow escape sends Reach tumbling down into a waterworks station filled with corpses, where it becomes aware of its cold body. Luckily it finds — but what else? — a raggedy trench coat à la “The Terminator

.”

From the body of a dead police officer, Reach retrieves a gun that doubles as a baton. Climbing back to the sun-flooded surface, Reach runs through a strikingly colored autumnal wooded area that gives way to a clearing. In the distance, beyond a wall, can be seen Phoenix City.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and

log into

your Times account, or

subscribe

for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?

Log in

.

Want all of The Times?

Subscribe

.

Related Content

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT