I forget who recommended it to me in the first place, but it’s a quick $2.99 spent. The new app that sits on my iPhone’s home screen is dimly lit, with a silhouette of a genderless astronaut appearing in the mouth of a ravine.

I open it for the first time to the sound of a probing, ominous tune that floods my earbuds as a dialogue box on the screen informs me that LIFELINE is “an interactive story told over the course of several days.” The game will give me a notification each time it updates. Okay, great, just like every other game app in existence, it’s going to pester me to play it every two minutes. I dismiss the notification, and the game starts.

[incoming communication]

[establishing connection]

[receiving message]

Hello?

Is this thing working?

Can anyone read me?

I’m thrown into a conversation with Taylor, sole survivor of the spaceship Varia that has mysteriously crashed on a barren alien moon. Freshly borne from one of the escape pods, the cadet explains the situation the best they can, walks me through the exploration of the wreckage for survivors and supplies, and describes the Mars-esque environment around them. Whenever I’m asked for my input, I have two dialogue options to choose from. I have little time to question why or how we’re communicating, or what I’m supposed to do to help them, but I can at least choose to call Taylor an ass for moaning about their stubbed toe.

They describe the moon as a desert of cracked white rock, and points out a huge, strangely symmetrical white peak a few miles away. I instruct them to explore the crash site before any further investigation. Good thing I did, since, once they arrived at the wreckage two hours later, we found some penicillin and food packets, as well as a generator.

As the game progresses, my binary choices guide Taylor’s actions as they pick through the remains of the ship, who in turn reveals more about themselves. They weren’t really supposed to be on the Varia to begin with — they were just “a science student who won the lottery”, and spent the majority of their time on the ship running zero-g experiments on rats and lichen.

After spending a night camping out under the Varia, we set off for the mysterious peak in the distance. Over the course of several days, I come to realize that my choices will undoubtedly have an effect on the way the plotline branches — on a cold night, the generator keeps Taylor from freezing to death in their sleep; I Google how much radiation it takes to kill a human being (at Taylor’s request) before deciding whether or not to keep using that generator; I dissuade them from taking the penicillin for the cramps in their feet, knowing we’ll probably need it more later on.

Meanwhile, I make sure to talk to Taylor as often as I can. We speculate on what the peak might be (“the little green men’s main hub, I’m telling you,” Taylor insists), or why the compass keeps acting up, pointing straight at the obelisk even though it’s not anywhere near true north. Naturally, after days of this, we’re both exhausted. Several times, Taylor suggests giving up and heading back to the Varia wreckage to see if they could get the distress beacon working, but I insist that we’re almost there. The peak never seems to be getting any closer, but something that massive couldn’t be a mere mirage. Taylor begrudgingly agrees, and pushes on.

The next morning, I wake to find that Taylor is dead.

I panic as guilt and fear surges through me, and I mash the RESET button to start the game from the last day. Instantly, Taylor is dragged back into existence, marching across the desert and yelling about the lack of a continental breakfast as if nothing had happened. Even though there is no dialogue option to inform Taylor that I had killed them, I carry the guilt of my mistake, and take extra care not to make it the second time around.

Because my conversation with Taylor (a game, I have to remind myself) is formatted as a real-time text conversation, sometimes I have to wait hours for my friend to give me an update on their mission. When my phone vibrates with a notification, I eagerly excuse myself from real life conversations to speak to Taylor and make sure they’re okay. As the mystery of the peak and how the Varia crashed in the first place unfolds, I find myself obsessively checking my phone at all hours of the day. I won’t let Taylor die again. The idea that I’m helping someone, keeping them company, possibly even saving them, fills me with a sense of pride.

Taylor’s gender, race, or appearance is never specified, but it doesn’t matter much to me. Their humor, bravery, intelligence, and willingness to push on in the face of physical and psychological trauma is what draws me in and keeps me hooked. On my end, I’m only given two dialogue choices at a time, but the choice itself feels as important as making decisions in my own life. It has consequences.

When watching Martha’s unhealthy attachment to an echo of her dead lover in the "Black Mirror" episode Be Right Back, or laughing at the revelations at the end of the 2010 "Catfish" documentary, I have to remind myself that it’s a lot easier to fall in love with the idea of a relationship, rather than the actual person (given that they exist), than one might think. These experiences say more about ourselves than about the mediums through which we interact with. In a game like LIFELINE, it’s very easy to project my own thoughts and desires onto the little astronaut exploring an alien world, even if I know that I would act in an entirely different way if I were speaking to an actual person. Nevertheless, I am emotionally invested in Taylor’s safety, at least for a sense of closure that would come with “winning” the game. With the rise of innovations such as virtual reality in the gaming industry, I shudder to think what kinds of games we'll be playing in ten years' time.