Smiley, operator of The Dating Game.
Head AS Code is a Psychological Thriller Horror Visual Novel, and the first installment of developer Miracle Moon's "Abime" series, which also includes Birth Me Code. The original version was released in 2018, but a remastered version was made available in 2021.
On April 22, 2022, Simon Fournier had finally finished his exams, and was going home in a train with his childhood friend, Jasmine, and his roommate, Marco. However, he took a nap along the way, and when he woke up, something was amiss; he quickly realized he was no longer in the train. Now in the company of friends, strangers and foes, he has no choice but to play a dangerous game operated by the enigmatic Smiley. It was a merciless environment where tensions rose from seemingly nothing, where no one is safe, and where any misstep could get you killed. One question quickly becomes two, then five, then twenty. What is Smiley's real identity, and was he actually among them? Who really are the other participants? What is the purpose of the Dating Game? And most importantly...who will be making the sacrifice?
Tropes:
- 20 Minutes into the Future: The game is set in the close-to-release-date year of 2022. Except, by the time the final route takes place, it's taking place a few hundred years later, and Simon is in a simulation of the original date.
- After the End: In the Golden Ending, it's revealed that the world has flooded due to global warming, with the entire game taking place on an "island" that used to be Mont-Royal, a mountain in Montreal, Canada.
- Amnesiac Dissonance: In the Golden Ending, it's revealed that Emily was part of an organization known as "Empty S" that originally created the Dating Game for scientific reasons, but was forced to forget about that when she became a participant.
- Anthropic Principle: Exploited in-universe; see the description for Exploiting the Fourth Wall below for details.
- Anyone Can Die: As part of the nature of a Deadly Game with Multiple Endings, there are various branches where different characters perish, including Simon himself.
- But Thou Must!: All of the Story Branching is locked until the player reaches the first ending. Additionally, in the Golden Ending, Simon takes control from "God" and refuses to forgive the mastermind, whether or not the player chose to do so.
- Deadly Game: The titular "Dating Game" is one of these.
- Dead All Along: In the Golden Ending, all of the current Dating Game participants are actually robotic duplicates, with the original versions of everyone (save for Emily) having died in Ending A over two hundred years ago.
- The Dog Was the Mastermind: The true mastermind of the Dating Game is Emily, albeit a much older version of her that's neither blind nor deaf.
- Evolving Title Screen: After reaching Ending A, the title screen occasionally has an Ominous Visual Glitch that represents a character's death. Reaching the final ending changes the screen to remove "Head A" from the title, leaving only "S Code".
- Exploiting the Fourth Wall: Played for Drama in the Golden Ending. The reason why "Empty S" set up the original Dating Game is to retroactively cause their own existence, by summoning "God" (a player) with a story so intriguing that they'll want to uncover all of the lore.
- First-Person Perspective: The entire story is told from Simon's perspective.
- A Good Way to Die: In the Golden Ending, Emily's scientifically-enhanced lifespan is coming to a natural end before she can make another iteration of the Dating Game, and she passes away peacefully when Simon forgives her past self.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: Whenever a Bad Ending is reached, Simon wakes back up in the subway car he began in. It later turns out to all be a simulation that keeps repeating.
- Heroic Sacrifice: In the Golden Ending, Simon sets the reactor powering the Dating Game to blow, taking himself and the original Emily's corpse with it.
- Malevolent Masked Men: The person running the Dating Game, "Smiley", is a robed cultist who's always seen wearing a hexagonal-shaped helmet that covers his entire face, with his name and a toothy smile painted on the front.
- Multiple Endings: The story has a total of nineteen endings, only some of which must be viewed in order to unlock the Golden Ending.
- Must Make Amends: This turns out to be the mastermind's motivation. The original Emily got the original Simon killed, and has been trying to recreate the circumstances that originally bonded them in order to be forgiven. However, she's had to repeatedly kill other simulated lives in the process, and Simon refuses to make amends with what she's become.
- My Future Self and Me: In the Golden Ending, Simon meets a version of himself that was allowed to grow up with a copy of Emily, but didn't quite fit what the original Emily wanted, leading to more Dating Game iterations.
- Off with His Head!: This is the fate of anyone that loses the Dating Game. In the default ending path, Simon ends up beheaded by an elevator door.
- Ominous Visual Glitch: After obtaining the first ending, the title screen occasionally glitches out, depicting the title as "DEAD AS Code" and showing a character with their head misaligned to represent the cost of losing the Dating Game.
- Player and Protagonist Integration: In the Golden Ending, the player is referred to as "God", and the reason why the current Simon remembers his predecessors' deaths. Trying to make Simon forgive Emily has him outright refuse to, no longer wanting "God" to control his life; in the original version, this also prevented the player from restarting the game after his Heroic Sacrifice.
- Point-and-Click Game: There are multiple sections in which the player is meant to explore a room, finding objects and solving puzzles in order to make progress.
- Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: There are some locks in the story's flowchart, mainly on the path to the Golden Ending, that can only be broken by reaching different endings and have Simon remember details for the next iteration of the "Groundhog Day" Loop.
- Robotic Reveal: The Golden Ending reveals that all of the Dating Game participants past the first iteration, including Smiley, are easily-reproduced simulacra created by Emily for the purpose of engineering a very specific outcome.
- Shoehorned Acronym: In the Golden Ending, the android models designed by Emily are designated as "Electro-autonomous Memory-driven Informal LibrarY", just so she could also call them EMILY.
- Significant Anagram: In the Golden Ending, the mastermind reveals that an odd sentence encountered early on, "None Smiile Withine My Mask", is an anagram of the only way to truly win the Dating Game: Simon with Emily makes nine. Simon calls them out on how obtuse and undecipherable that is to a regular person. There's also a second anagram in the form of the true identity of "Smiley" being "Emily S".
- That Man Is Dead: In the Golden Ending, Simon "forgives" the Emily he had originally met, but makes it clear that she's not the same as the Emily that has been running the Dating Game. This is still enough for Emily to make peace with in her final moments.
- The Ending Changes Everything: The Golden Ending recontextualizes nearly everything about the story, turning it from a regular Psychological Thriller into Science Fiction.
- Title Drop: A double-example in the Golden Ending, as the phrase "head as code" refers to Emily making android duplicates of Simon by scanning the brain of the original's decapitated head and converting the information into digital code, while a capitalized "AS" refers to Emily's designating each "timeline" with a letter, with the original Simon's beheading as the first (Ending A: Head), and the final chain of events as the nineteenth (Ending S: Code).
- Unwinnable by Design: It's eventually revealed that the Dating Game was set up to create a very specific outcome, and should it be "won" in any other way, the participants are all erased and restarted.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: In the Golden Ending, Simon is aghast with Emily's constant disposal of copies of their former friends, as he sees them all as real as the originals.
- You Wake Up in a Room: The Dating Game's participants, including Simon, wake up in an abandoned subway train and are forced to escape a metro system-turned-Deadly Game.
