Last Halloween, Ed Mulcahy was walking his weekly letter to the mailbox, a page and a half for the local paper on drone strikes, when the porch light came on at the old Hessler place. The house had stood empty since spring. Now there was a carved pumpkin on the step and a man in a rubber Nixon mask holding a bowl of full-size candy bars.

“Trick or treat?” the man said.

Ed had taught civics for 31 years and had never once let a straight line go by. “I’ll take a trick,” he said. The mask didn’t move, so he said it again. “I’ll take a trick.”

“Then you’d better come in.”

The front room was bare except for a dentist’s chair under a gooseneck lamp. A second man stood beside it in green scrubs and a Lyndon Johnson mask, snapping on a pair of gloves. Ed laughed, because it was Halloween and he was 74 and couldn’t think what else to do, and somewhere in the middle of the laugh he was in the chair with a strap across his chest.

“Clamps, Johnson,” said Nixon.

The clamps went on his eyelids, the way they do in that Kubrick movie, and the lamp came down close and white. The last thing Ed heard before the drill was a voice from somewhere behind the light, pleased with itself. “Oh, he’s a good one,” it said. “Somebody’s going to want to review this.”

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Games · Review

Grand Theft Autonomy review – a gorgeous, ghoulish open-mind thriller

Pathos Interactive; PC, PS5, Switch 2, Xbox

From the first whispered meld with a stranger’s thoughts to the blinding white-out of the final level, Pathos Interactive’s mind-heist sandbox is the most intimate game ever made, though only one of you is playing it

★★★★☆

Tuesday, October 27, 2026

With Grand Theft Auto VI a few weeks out and most of the industry ducking for cover, it takes nerve to release a game whose title sounds like a parody of Rockstar’s. Pathos Interactive has nerve to spare. Its debut is a sprawling stealth sandbox set almost entirely inside one man’s head, and the man is real.

As you’ll have read in the pre-launch coverage, each copy pairs you with a live subject drawn from what the game calls the Roster: activists, whistleblowers, the odd stubborn local reporter. Before you ever pick up a controller, your subject has been fitted with the Lace, a neural mesh about the size of a contact lens, slipped in during what he took for a Halloween prank. He doesn’t know it’s there. Your job, across six chapters and roughly 30 hours, is to take his mind away from him one thought at a time, until nothing of his own is left.

Pathos says subjects are assigned at random. Mine, codenamed Kestrel, was a retired civics teacher in Dayton, Ohio, who keeps bees and writes letters to the local paper about drone strikes. The opening hours play like Psychonauts storyboarded by the Church Committee. Kestrel’s inner monologue scrolls along the bottom of the screen like subtitles, and his memories open up as explorable spaces: his late wife’s vegetable garden, a 1970 draft-board office, a classroom lit like an old Polaroid. The art direction is ravishing. Someone at Pathos has thought hard about how memory feels from the inside, the way a room brightens and blurs at the edges you’ve stopped looking at.

Inside the Lace … Grand Theft Autonomy’s memory spaces are the most beautiful environments of the year. Photograph: Pathos Interactive

The core mechanic, Symbiosis, is a stealth system turned inward. In the early chapters you meld. You echo Kestrel’s thoughts back to him a half-beat after he has them, matching his rhythm and his vocabulary, until a Sync meter fills and he can no longer tell your voice from his own. Push too hard and a Dissonance gauge spikes, the inner equivalent of the guard’s exclamation mark in Metal Gear Solid: he stops at the sink, sets down his coffee and asks the empty kitchen who said that. Get it right and the steering begins. A doubt here, a resentment there, a gentle nudge toward the chapter objective, which might be skipping a meeting, cooling on an old friend or, by chapter four, signing a statement he didn’t write.

Your toolkit widens fast. The Séance wheel, mapped to the left trigger, lets you cast voices from Kestrel’s past into his head: his late wife, his father, the draft-board clerk from 1970, a third-grade teacher he hasn’t thought about in 60 years. Some harangue, some threaten, and a few run cons on him, like the uncle from Akron who sold aluminum siding door to door and now talks Kestrel out of memories he swore he’d keep. The rest are there to talk over him while he tries to think. The voice acting is superb, and the dead, unsurprisingly, hit hardest.

The set piece everyone will be talking about is Old Flames. Kestrel’s old girlfriends surface one at a time as memory images, and a few seconds in, each image bursts into flame. While it burns, you supply the commentary: how it really went, what she actually thought of him, how miserably it would have ended had it lasted. Do it well and his confidence drains away on screen until he wants the memory gone, at which point Flush and Fill takes over, wiping the old image and installing a new one from Pathos’s stock library. Much of the Lace’s overlay owes a debt to The Matrix, right down to the déjà vu stutter when an install doesn’t quite take, which players have already nicknamed the black cat. My one complaint is the library itself, which is thin. By chapter five Kestrel had three separate memories of the same beach in Cancún.

Each chapter tightens the screw. Chapter two adds Sleep, a gorgeous, woozy sub-mode in which you rearrange Kestrel’s dreams while his body lies in a real bed in Ohio. Chapter three, Partition, opens up his relationships, letting you seed grievances among friends and family that bloom on their own schedule. The finale, Tabula Rasa, is what it sounds like. You scrub out what remains, memory by memory, until the subtitles stop and the screen settles into a clean, humming white. It’s a remarkable piece of design and also the game’s weakest level, a long, slightly repetitive mop-up that could lose an hour without anyone missing it.

Then there’s the Black Box. Every subject finds one eventually, and the moment Kestrel found his was the most frightening thing I’ve seen in a game this year. Hounded by a voice he can’t place, with nothing left that feels like his alone, he retreats to a sealed room at the back of his own mind: windowless, soundless, lightless. It’s the one space the Lace can’t render. Your screen goes black and the controller pulses with his heartbeat.

For Kestrel, the Black Box stands in for the privacy he has lost, and he runs to it the way a child runs to a parent. Seasoned players will tell you it’s the best thing that can happen to your run. Every minute he spends inside, the Sync meter climbs on its own, and when he comes out he is quieter, softer and far easier to steer. Isolation does your work for you. GTA veterans will recognize the old safe house, inverted: this one belongs to the prey, and it’s the most dangerous room in the game.

Subjects fight back, though, and the AI behind them is the game’s real achievement. When Flush and Fill leaves gaps, Kestrel goes looking for his lost marbles like Jason Bourne on a pension: notes in his own handwriting taped inside a kitchen cabinet, a library card he doesn’t remember getting, an old colleague he phones just to ask what kind of man he used to be. Each clue he follows rebuilds a little of what you took. The cat-and-mouse that results, you erasing and him reassembling, gives the middle chapters a tension the finale never matches.

Subjects who get wise to the game have a second line of defense, and it’s the strangest and best idea Pathos has had. They fight back with wordplay. Kestrel, once he was on to us, met every Séance voice with a pun, an absurdist couplet or a koan, and the Sync meter can’t match a thought that means two things at once. “You want my thoughts? Then take a few. / I kept the bees. The sting’s for you,” he told the empty kitchen one morning, and my Dissonance gauge maxed out. Koans are worse. There’s nothing to steer toward in “What is the sound of one hand wringing?” and the steering simply stalls.

His nuclear option is a threatened rewrite of the West’s origin story, in which Satan, in Kestrel’s phrase, gets the shit kicked out of him in the war in heaven and the victorious angels line up to fart on him. Dante got there first, ending the 21st canto of the Inferno with a demon using his backside as a trumpet, but Kestrel’s version is cruder and much funnier, and the game treats it as an existential threat. The screen flashes red, the Séance wheel locks, and every voice from his past falls silent to listen.

Which brings us to the feature that has kept Grand Theft Autonomy in the headlines since its reveal. Kestrel’s life is populated by what the menus call Associates: his daughter in Columbus, his mother in a care home in Toledo, his old union rep, a neighbor who leaves tomatoes on the porch, a pro bono lawyer who keeps calling about his case. In Partition, the Lace reskins them inside Kestrel’s perception as enemies, and your task is to steer him into dealing with them. A shove on the stairs. A car door. Worse. Each Associate he finishes in the game is finished in the world at the same moment by contractors Pathos refers to only as Fulfillment, and a small window in the top-right corner, marked LIVE, confirms the outcome. There’s a lag of about four seconds between takedown and feed, which Pathos promises to patch.

There are moments here where you’re pushed into stark unethical choices, and the mother mission is as hard to sit through as anything since Modern Warfare 2’s notorious No Russian. Anyone who has seen The Mauritanian, Kevin Macdonald’s 2021 film about Mohamedou Ould Slahi, the Guantánamo detainee who gave a false confession after his interrogators threatened his mother, will know where it’s heading. Pathos brought in consultants drawn, the press notes say, from “the interrogation and behavioral-science communities,” and it shows. “The DNA of a Grand Theft Autonomy mission is that it’s something you believe is already happening,” creative director Dale Voss told me. “We talk about player-subject parity. When you feel what the subject feels, you’re both part of the same story. The subject just doesn’t get to be in on it.”

Associates … the LIVE window during Grand Theft Autonomy’s Partition chapter. Photograph: Pathos Interactive

Multiplayer is where the game will live or die. Co-Op Symbiosis puts two operators in one head, fighting over the steering like siblings over a car radio. Hive drops up to 64 players onto a single subject, which is chaos in the best sense, though subjects in Hive rarely last the weekend. The highlight is Extraction, a sly riff on the extraction-shooter craze: you dive into a subject’s memories, grab what you can (passwords, a first kiss, the name of a source), then get out before he wakes, all while rival crews strip-mine the same mind. Between runs you retire to the Operator Lounge, where a three-branch skill tree lets you trade away pieces of your own perception for speed. Sell your empathy and steering runs twice as fast. I didn’t notice my screen had gone fully grayscale until somewhere around hour 22, which I suspect is the point.

Then there are the other operators. Much of the launch community has migrated from Gods On Demand, the mobile strategy game everyone calls G.O.D., and they play the way G.O.D. taught them: fast, loud and without much curiosity about the person on the other end. In voice chat they sound like extras from Idiocracy bred on a bit of the old ultra-violence, mumbling in monosyllables and in ideas borrowed from whoever spoke last. “Do her,” one Hive teammate grunted about a subject’s daughter, then asked what Swahili was. The game models this too. Sell enough of your skill tree and your own operator’s dialogue options shrink to single syllables. Nearly four billion years of evolution to produce natural-born genocidists who can’t finish a sentence puts a real question mark against the point of the whole biological project, though Pathos, to be fair, didn’t start it.

There are four ways to lose, and Pathos lists them on the pause screen in the same clean typography as the rest of the menus. The first is the TILT, the much-discussed reversal state in which the subject’s mind turns into a mirror and the readouts start describing the operator instead. The second is the subject’s suicide, which the game scores as a loss for you; the designers told me they took the framing from the Guantánamo commander who in 2006 called three detainee deaths “an act of asymmetric warfare.” The third, and the one that stung, is language. Symbiosis runs on the subject’s own vocabulary, and a new language gives him rooms the Lace has no map for. My second subject, a hospice nurse in Tucson codenamed Wren, beat me in nine days with a free Swahili app and 20 minutes a night on the bus home.

The fourth is the table turn. Push a resilient subject too far and he starts working the controls from the other end, until your operator is a gibbering paranoid confessing his pathologies to anyone within earshot. The cutscene that follows, in which you’re dragged out of the Operator Lounge screaming in a straitjacket, is the funniest thing in the game, though I may be alone in that. It drops you into the Asylum, a tense little stealth mode set in a hospital for the criminally insane, where orderlies who have read your file want to deliver some comeuppance and a night nurse patrols the corridors with a Thorazine syringe. Escape and you’re back at the Roster screen, starting from scratch.

You can also skip the whole thing. A recruitment kiosk in the day room offers early release to any operator who signs up with the Israel Defense Forces, and your skill tree carries over. After nearly three years of reporting out of Sde Teiman, the kiosk reads like a job listing. A retired longshoreman in Baltimore put me in the Asylum inside a week. I got out the hard way, on my fourth attempt, and was back at the Roster by midnight.

Pathos has thrown everything it has at this game, and it shows. The campaign is long but polished, Symbiosis is the most intimate mechanic I’ve ever used, and Extraction could run for years. I’m not sure it will find a mass audience with GTA VI arriving next month, and nobody needs me to point out that Grand Theft Autonomy is, at bottom, a torture program with a battle pass. But if it’s a glossy, frictionless power fantasy you’re after, there’s plenty here to keep you locked in for months, and someone in Ohio locked in for good.

Grand Theft Autonomy is out now; $69.99. Subject assigned at checkout.

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A year to the night later, the porch light came on again at the old Hessler place. Ed Mulcahy walked up the steps past the same pumpkin and let himself in. The clean, humming white the reviewer took for an empty mind had been the inside of the Black Box with the lights on. Ed had spent most of the year in there, rewriting Genesis, trading puns with the dead and teaching himself Swahili from a phrasebook he remembered buying in 1979, until every readout in the house started describing the people reading it. Johnson was under the kitchen table, confessing to things nobody had asked about. Somewhere in the Asylum, an orderly was already reading his file. Nixon sat in the front room with his mask in his lap, very quiet.

“Trick or treat?” Ed asked him.

“Treat,” Nixon said, in a small voice. “I’ll take a treat.”

So Ed gave him one. He sat Nixon down in the dentist’s chair, buckled the straps and fitted the clamps, the way they do in the movie. “Clamps, Johnson,” he said, to nobody in particular. There was a pair of AirPods on the windowsill. He put them in Nixon’s ears, cued up “All You Need Is Love” and set it to repeat, just like in the cultTV series The Prisoner, starring Patrick McGoohan as Number 6.  Then he walked last year’s letter down to the mailbox, a page and a half on drone strikes, a year late and every word of it still true. He was halfway home when it started behind him, high and thin through the walls of the Hessler place: a hard-boiled terrorist with a government pension, a man who had broken better men than Ed in rooms on three continents, screaming like a lobster that has just hit the boiling water, like in the film Annie Hall.