I played a visual novel about the terror of having a 'casual' boss and a job that wants you to conform to society's expectations—but not the ones involving economic stability

A man in a yellow t-shirt with a turtle on it against the backdrop of a relaxed office space — (Image credit: Transcenders)

Truer than You is a visual novel about the gig economy. You're hired by a start-up run by a techbro who wears "fun" t-shirts—always a warning sign—to complete vague tasks delivered via phone app. It's sort of like Fiverr only the jobs range from helping someone who might be an artist or might be a terrorist record a threatening video to being someone's plus-one at an event they don't want to attend alone like Jenny Got-No-Friends.

At the end of each gig you're given a score out of five, and it says something about how accurately it captured the Uber driver experience that when I got a four-out-of-five rating I responded with indignation they'd docked me a point, instead of relief that I'd actually scored quite well.

While some of the jobs are just "drive me to this place so I can pick up a parcel," a lot of them are about performing gender. Which is relevant, because the protagonist is non-binary, yet constantly being hired by a wife who wants to be seen with a handsome young man to make her absentee husband jealous, or two feminist radicals who want help with their environmental awareness-raising (and also maybe a third member for their polycule).

Decisions are made by choosing from speech balloons that fade away as you click through the narration. You never know how many more will pop up, so you have to choose between reacting quickly based on the first couple of options, or potentially losing the first option while waiting for a third or fourth to arrive. Simply letting them fade and not saying anything can be a valid choice too, depending on the client and what they want from you.

You also have the option to pursue some gigs and not others, or even quit your job entirely. I ditched Emerald and her jealous husband storyline because it had the worst writing, full of clunky phrases like "I stopped to a halt." There's a stilted quality to some of the writing in Truer than You, which might be down to the developers being Swedish (references to "lingonberry jam" and the like give it away), though in other places it reads more like deliberate awkwardness on the part of specific characters.

Kissing a woman with flowers in her hair — I've seen Midsommar, I know this ends badly. (Image credit: Transcenders)

While your techbro boss (who is absolutely ready to replace you with AI as soon as it's feasible) has a set of rules that forbid relationships with clients, they seem to be inevitable. You have to choose a task on your phone every morning, including weekends, which might include someone you met while you were performing an identity wanting to hang out.

On my first playthrough I joined the polycule, which led to an abrupt ending. Fortunately, Truer than You is short enough to play a couple of times in an evening so I went back and leaned into its mystery storyline instead.

Turns out you've moved to the city and taken this strange job while you track down info on someone called Yoon who was important to you, and who died recently after moving to the city to go to college. The relationship you have with Yoon and what happened to him are another thread to follow on your own time and ultimately a more interesting one than all the dating, so I quit my job and found a much more satisfying conclusion on my second go-around.

Choosing between a ponytail or a casual hairstyle — The most difficult choice of all. (Image credit: Transcenders)

It's a shame that Truer than You is missing some of the quality-of-life features standard in Japanese visual novels, like a text log you can scroll back or the ability to fast-forward text you've already read, or just a way to hide the text and take a nice screenshot. It tells you up front the story's written for replaying, but the UI could support that a little better.

Truer than You is available on Steam and itch, and has a demo you can try.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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