It is not often that a game leaves you sitting in silence, staring at the credits while you process what you just experienced. Yet, As Long As You're Here, the new first-person narrative title from developer Autoscopia Interactive that landed on Steam on October 15, 2025, is precisely that kind of game. It’s not a game about winning, or skill, or reflexes. It’s a game about empathy, and it delivers one of the most powerful, moving experiences of the year.
The game places you in the mind of Annie, an elderly woman in the progressing stages of Alzheimer's disease. This is not a horror game, but the sense of disorientation and creeping dread it invokes is more profound than any jump scare. From a first-person view, you navigate Annie's apartment, where the mundane becomes monumental. Simple tasks like making tea or finding keys are complicated by a world that no longer feels reliable. The game’s true genius lies in how it uses its environment to tell its story. Time skips unexpectedly. Rooms subtly shift their layouts. A familiar hallway becomes a disorienting maze, perfectly simulating the heartbreaking confusion of memory loss without ever feeling exploitative.
The gameplay itself is intentionally minimalist, focusing on simple point-and-click interactions that become progressively more unreliable as Annie's condition worsens. This isn't about solving complex logic puzzles; it's about experiencing the failure of a system that should be intuitive. Autoscopia Interactive made a brave design choice here, trusting the player to find meaning in the experience itself rather than in challenge-based rewards. This design forces you to slow down and prevents the game from ever sensationalizing its subject matter, instead grounding you firmly in Annie's new, uncertain reality.
This is a story about the fragility of memory and the complex, messy, and powerful bonds of family. As Annie, you interact with your children, who are struggling with the best ways to care for you. The dialogue is subtle, mature, and painfully realistic. As Long As You're Here doesn't just ask you to watch a tragedy unfold, it instead asks you to live it, to feel Annie's panic, her brief moments of lucidity, and her frustration. It is a short experience, clocking in at just over an hour, but that single hour packs more emotional weight than most 50-hour epics.
The game's visuals and audio are equally restrained and effective. The apartment is rendered in a soft, clean art style that initially feels warm and safe, but this familiar aesthetic makes the disorienting shifts and memory-bled-through-reality moments even more jarring. The sound design is wonderfully subtle, filled with the ambient sounds of a home and a sparse, gentle score. It’s often the silences, however, or the suddenly muffled quality of a family member's voice, that truly build the game's unsettling and deeply personal atmosphere.
As Long As You're Here is a triumph of interactive storytelling. It stands as a sensitive, intelligent, and deeply affecting piece of art that understands the unique power of video games to build empathy. While it is a somber and often difficult journey, it is an exceptionally beautiful and important one. Autoscopia Interactive has crafted a quiet masterpiece that will stay with you long after the credits roll, reminding us of the profound impact of love and connection, even when memories fade.
Score
Additional Information
- As Long As You're Here
- Developed by: Autoscopia Interactive
- Published by: Autoscopia Interactive
- Price: Starting at $9.99 (USD)
- Platform reviewed on: PC via Steam
- PC specs: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, Nvidia RTX 4080, 32GB DDR4 3600 RAM, 1440p resolution
- ESRB: Not rated
- This game was provided to Total Gaming Network for review purposes.



Edit: I much later realized what I posted is so generic that it could apply to other short game reviews. Since that was not my intention, I'll add that I'm interested in how the developers portray the struggles, fears, and perseverance through love. The examples you've listed (layout changes, time skips, and audio changes) sound like they're both gameplay and plot devices, or at least a way to show what life is like for those who don't have this condition. Reminds me of the creativity developers have to portray what life is like with sight impairment (whether it's partially or fully blind). I haven't seen a good one to portray deafness yet though (The Quiet Man for example didn't do it for me). Anyway, I want to give this a try and stream to a friend. I don't think I want to experience this emotional story alone.