Shortly after being created, a player-customized humanoid robot receives instructions from its AI creator. It must learn the mannerisms, culture, and habits of humans, and learn to live among them. But not in the name of harmony! The AI seeks world domination, and to achieve this goal the robot must face the most difficult challenge known to man: talking to other humans.

If social scenarios such as job interviews, doctor examinations, and romantic conversations fill you with dread, you haven’t seen anything yet.  Manipulating the robot’s tongue and lips to simulate human speech is an ordeal of its own -- intentionally challenging controls only exacerbate the difficulty, ratcheting up the laughs.

Squash and stretch its lips into fantastically ugly and absurd contortions to create the proper mouth shapes to emit different sounds. Manipulate the tongue to hit the proper buttons inside the robotic mouth. Keep that gross tentacle within the confines of the android’s jaw while also keeping coughing, stuttering, and awkward breathing to a minimum. A Karaoke-style text box guides the robot, suggesting extremely human phrases such as “HOW MANY UNITS OF CURRENCY ARE REQUIRED TO PURCHASE ONE ETHANOL BEVERAGE?”

Stuttering or tripping on words raises suspicion with conversational partners and makes speech harder to simulate. Systems shut down to due emotional stress, causing the android’s ears to pop out and its face to swell and twitch as it explodes with steam, oil, and electricity. With nimble fingers, you can help the robot can recover, and the gullible humans can ignore the smoke pouring out of its ears. Silly, trusting humans. Which you definitely also are.

Speaking Simulator’s hilariously absurd aesthetic willingly embraces the Uncanny Valley. By subverting regular social interactions and exaggerating the capabilities of the (totally) human face, anyone can relate to the poor android’s struggle. Maybe not so much with the world domination part.

“Speaking Simulator is a game that gets how hard it is to speak sometimes,” said Jed Dawson, co-founder at Affable Games. “A lot of people don’t realize the difficult mechanics behind making words. Speaking Simulator with its QWOP style controls will show just how tricky that is.”

Speaking Simulator will be available in English in 2019.