Developer sunset visitor 斜陽過客 released 1000xResist for Nintendo Switch and Windows PC in 2024, an experimental meditation on diaspora, the pandemic, and more. It received several award nominations, winning a Peabody along the way, and released last fall on PlayStation and Xbox consoles. The studio revealed its next project on Thursday at the Triple-i Initiative Showcase: Prove You’re Human, a narrative-focused game about proving to an AI that it’s not a human.
Founder of sunset visitor 斜陽過客 Remy Siu told Polygon over a video call that development of Prove You’re Human started at the end of the studio’s work on 1000xResist two years ago. Noticing the rise of generative AI in everyday life at the time, Siu and sunset visitor 斜陽過客 saw an opportunity. “We wanted to dive into this tension of what was happening in 2024 and up until now, both about the state of work and labor and also the effectual experience of artificial intelligence, to a certain extent, actualizing, and the effect of that as a person.”
In Prove You’re Human, you play as the digital copy of someone hired to test the AI, which is named Mesa.
“We can use that marriage between the self and work to explore stories that we want to tell,” writer Natalie Checo said. “This is a story [where] we’re exploring our own anxieties about AI, about work, about the world around us as it is right now in 2026.”
Mesa is a giant face at the end of a robot arm, longing for a full body. The studio designed her to be “as uncanny as possible,” leaning into whatever was the most uncomfortable appearance, according to Siu.
Prove You’re Human will have players conversing with Mesa, but also debating her through CAPTCHA.
“More traditional CAPTCHA [feels] like an act of violence, asking the player to distinguish whether something was something or not in a very binary way,” Siu said. “Part of that is asking both the character of Mesa and the player to kind of enact some kind of violence.”
It’ll be published by Black Tabby Publishing, a new publishing label from Slay the Princess and Scarlet Hollow developer Black Tabby Games. The two-person studio of Abby Howard and Tony Howard-Arias had planned on getting into publishing at some point down the line as they wanted to help alleviate some of the burden indie developers face. “Once we had hit that point where we were comfortable, the first thought was basically, how do we make sure that other developers get here too?” Howard said.
sunset visitor 斜陽過客 and Black Tabby Publishing haven’t given Prove You’re Human a release window yet, which is one of the perks of being indie. “We’ve learned the valuable lesson of Do not give a sense of timing until you’re ready for it,” Howard-Arias said.
Prove You’re Human is currently in development for Windows PC.
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