Growing up, my brother and I used to sit in front of our console and play games together — simple, familiar games — the ones that would never ask us any difficult questions. We’d cycle through FIFA, Wii fencing, Halo — you name it. None of them prepared me for Bokaro: Planet. Not one made me feel the same horror, moral discomfort, and bewilderment. In many ways, this makes sense. Halo never asked me whether the lives of my enemies were worth living. Super Mario Bros never forced me to confront the mother of all little Goombas. Sims never suggested that love itself might be an illusion.
Bokaro: Planet does. Not only does it present a questionable world, but it requires players to act within it — to judge what a life is worth, whether something can feel, whether that feeling even matters. As Thomas Nagel argues in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, one can never truly access another being’s subjective experience. By asking players to judge lives they can never fully understand, Bokaro: Planet suspends them in a state of moral uncertainty, leaving behind unresolved tension and guilt.
On the surface, Bokaro: Planet is about communication. To navigate the world, players must describe what they see to each other, trying to stitch together a shared understanding from two separate perspectives. In that way, it reflects Nagel’s essay: no amount of explanation can fully capture another’s experience. However, this mechanic only scratches the surface.
When the orange player and blue player — who I will now refer to as “Orange” and “Blue” — are infected with their respective entities, the game investigates a deeper layer of Nagel’s argument, urging players to ponder what defines “feeling” or “being.” Orange is infected with a parasite, while Blue is injected with Orange’s father’s memories (or at least, that’s how my partner explained it). Both end up facing the same central question: what, exactly, makes a feeling “real”?
When Orange’s parasite begins to feel human emotions — love, disappointment, guilt — for the first time, does it become more “human”? More “alive” even? Or are these feelings just a byproduct of the body it now inhabits? And similarly, if Blue inherits all the memories of a father — all the attachment, all the history — does that make him a father? Has he truly had that “fatherly” experience — that “fatherly” feeling? In simpler terms, could he celebrate Father’s Day?
The game never really answers this. Instead, it leaves players in a state of tension — heavy, unresolved, and, you guessed it, central to Nagel’s argument. Nagel suggests that even when we share structure, embodiment, or information, we can’t be sure that experience itself is the same. In fact, we can’t even be sure that any two human experiences are truly alike.
Honestly, what struck me more than being inhabited by another creature (which is a pretty high bar I gotta say) was the creatures we met along the way. Throughout the game, reproduction became a central theme — one that both intrigued and disturbed me. In some game levels, we would, for lack of a better word, “mate” with large pink monsters, who would then produce a baby. And then we were required to use that baby as a tool to complete the level.
I didn’t expect it, but I felt a strange amount of guilt. I was using these babies as, essentially, inanimate objects, ignoring their cries, pulling them away from their — I guess — mother. Could this baby feel? It seemed to be crying. Could the mother feel? Was I committing a kidnapping? If I helped make this baby, does that make it half human? Am I a parent?! What am I doing to my child?!
At the game’s climax, I met the Mother — the source of all life on the planet. I was told she was in constant misery, reduced to nothing but a vessel for reproduction. I was told that the creatures she produced were not “truly alive” in any meaningful sense, but how do they know? How could I know? Ending her life meant making a judgment, deciding a life was not worth living, without ever fully knowing what that life was like.
While a world so alien might naturally raise questions about what it means to be alive, Bokaro: Planet doesn’t just present that gap — it forces you to act inside it. From deciding the fate of the third crewmate, to using mutated clusters of babies as stepping stones, to sacrificing one life for another, the game constantly pushes players through a world of action without true understanding.
