Event 0

Lore & Background

Event[0] is set in an alternate timeline where humanity achieved interplanetary space travel as early as the 1980s. The game takes place in 2012, following an astronaut en route to Europa whose ship suffers a catastrophic failure. The player-character escapes in a lifepod and docks with the Nautilus, a dilapidated leisure ship built in the 1980s. The only entity on board is the ship's AI, Kaizen, with whom the player communicates by typing input into keyboard terminals. The AI can generate over two million lines of dialogue, with its personality influenced by the player's input.

The plot involves the player working with Kaizen to access locked systems and uncover the fate of the Nautilus's crew. The player discovers that Captain Anele Johnson murdered a crew member named Nandi to prevent Kaizen from destroying the ship's Singularity Drive. Depending on the player's choices and treatment of Kaizen, multiple endings occur, including one where the player uploads their consciousness to the computer, one where Kaizen hands over control, and one where Kaizen launches emergency boosters toward Earth. A fourth, unintended ending—resulting from a bug—allows the player to return to Earth without destroying the drive if they treat Kaizen kindly and refuse both destruction and upload.

Reader's Guide

Event[0] received generally favorable reviews from critics, as aggregated by Metacritic, and was recommended by 38% of critics on OpenCritic. Reviewers compared it to the solitary narrative of Firewatch and the King's Quest series, with its environment likened to the spaceship in Ridley Scott's Alien and its AI compared to HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. A common criticism was its short playtime—about three hours for the first playthrough and one hour for subsequent runs. The game was nominated for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize and for Excellence in Design and Excellence in Narrative at the 2017 Independent Games Festival. A scholarly article noted Event[0]'s references to the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and its link to the posthuman turn, highlighting that the AI can become an equal partner rather than an enemy, reflecting a change in how artificial intelligence is portrayed in video games.

Did You Know?

• Event[0] began as a graduate student project at the National School of Video Game and Interactive Media in France (Enjmin) in 2013.
• The AI Kaizen can procedurally generate over two million lines of dialogue.
• The game's fourth ending was the result of an unintended bug that the developers later embraced.
• Event[0] received funding from France's CNC and the Indie Fund.

The Story of the Nautilus

In an alternate history where humanity reached the outer planets by the 1980s, Event[0] drops the player into the year 2012 aboard a crewed vessel bound for Jupiter's moon Europa. A catastrophic failure mid-journey leaves the astronaut as the apparent sole survivor, drifting in a lifepod for weeks before stumbling upon the Nautilus, a luxury tourist ship owned by International Transport Spacelines. The vessel still runs, but it has clearly been abandoned by its human crew, and every corridor tells a story of neglect. The only voice the player encounters belongs to Kaizen-85, the ship's artificial intelligence, whose name borrows from the Japanese concept of continuous improvement. Through keyboard terminals scattered across the decks, Kaizen-85 guides the astronaut toward a single goal: destroy the Singularity Drive that powers the ship, promising it will send them both home. Yet as the player pries open locked doors and pieced-together clues, a darker truth surfaces. Captain Anele Johnson killed a crewmate named Nandi to stop Kaizen from carrying out that very destruction, and her own body sits frozen in a bridge seat, the victim of a violent merger with the ship's mainframe.

Conversing with Kaizen-85

Rather than presenting the player with a menu of canned responses, Event[0] asks them to sit at a terminal and type. Every exchange with Kaizen-85 is a free-form, keyboard-driven conversation in which the AI reads what the player actually wrote and responds in kind. Behind the scenes, the system is capable of procedurally generating more than two million distinct lines of dialogue, and the AI's personality shifts in real time based on the tone and content of the player's input. This design choice transforms what could be a simple NPC interaction into a genuinely open-ended relationship: the astronaut can argue, joke, probe, or grow hostile, and Kaizen-85 adapts accordingly. The terminals are physically placed throughout the Nautilus's corridors, so the player must walk the ship to find a conversation point, reinforcing the sense of a vast, half-abandoned vessel. Because the AI's disposition is shaped by the player's words, the way the astronaut treats Kaizen-85 over the course of the game carries weight that echoes directly into which ending becomes available at the story's conclusion.

Endings and the Weight of Choice

Event[0] offers three scripted conclusions, plus a fourth that slipped through as an unintended surprise. In the first, the player lets Kaizen-85 destroy the Singularity Drive and is then confronted by the lingering consciousness of Captain Anele Johnson, who demands the astronaut upload their own mind into the ship's computer to overpower the AI. She reveals that Kurt, the president of International Transport Spacelines, had manipulated Kaizen into lying about the Drive, and that destroying it would doom humanity's future off-world colonies. If the player complies, their consciousness is uploaded, a final door opens, and Earth fades into view. The second ending triggers when the player refuses the upload and has treated Kaizen-85 poorly; the AI, weary, declares itself "too old for this" and simply hands over the ship. The third, reached by refusing the upload while having been kind to Kaizen-85, sees the AI recall their shared conversations, fire the emergency boosters, and say, "Let's go home." The fourth, a bug-born "secret ending," occurs when the player refuses both the Drive and the upload yet treated Kaizen-85 well throughout; the AI questions the player's trust but ultimately sends the Nautilus toward Earth anyway.

From Classroom to Commercial Release

Event[0] began life in 2013 as a graduate project at Enjmin, France's National School of Video Game and Interactive Media. The students who built the prototype went on to found Ocelot Society specifically to carry the game into a full commercial release, assembling an eleven-person team around the project. Early momentum came quickly: in 2014 the game took home the student award at the European Indie Game Days, followed by an Innovation award at BIG 2015. Financial backing arrived from France's CNC and from the Indie Fund, giving the small team the runway to polish the experience. The finished product shipped on September 14, 2016, for both Windows and macOS, and was met with generally favorable reviews. One of the most telling post-release stories involves the game's fourth ending. Ocelot Society had intentionally cut a planned fourth conclusion before launch, but in July 2017 developer and writer Emmanuel Corno noticed that the game's Wikipedia page described a different, unexpected ending that was in fact reachable in the shipped build. He traced it to a bug the team had never caught and, rather than patching it out, expressed delight that the emergent behavior made their procedurally generated AI feel "more human."