A couple days ago, I made a post addressing Pixelberry/Series Entertainment's "It Lives Within." At the time, I wasn't aware of the story, I only knew that the name was the same. Since then, I saw many people accusing it of plagiarizing our game. I decided to look into it more, and after having watched all the episodes on YouTube, the claims of plagiarism unfortunately seem to be valid. As such, I'd like to further address this situation, and provide a list of stolen ideas and art with screenshot proofs and explanations.
A few years ago, I had a video call with one of the original writers for the It Lives Series. He no longer works for Pixelberry, and did not work with them at the time of the video call. Though I knew nothing about their original plans for the game before starting this project (including that they also intended to name the game "It Lives Within"), he told me their plans on that call. It was going to be a survivor-type cave crawl story with giant bug-inspired and creepy crawler monster enemies, where you play as a new character who is attacked by these creatures while camping and separated from their friends. From my understanding, Connor and his crew would be sort of like Sam and Dean from SPN, acting as these experienced "hunters" who help protect them.
That is not what the story of what Choices "It Lives Within" was. At all.
This means that the AI """writers""" at Series Entertainment/PB were not creating this story based on the original writersā plans. They made their story idea later - after ILW was completed in its entirety. Therefore, it's reasonable to follow that unlike the title, these similarities are not coincidence. Though even then, the title It Lives Within had to do with the cave setting and going literally into the earth, while the AI version has nothing to do with caves. So the reasoning for the title is not the same as the reasoning for their original title.
With all this in mind, letās go over the similarities between our game and the Choices It Lives Within AI show. I am going to be putting it beneath a read more, in case there are people who are interested in playing ILW and donāt want to get it spoiled.
Major things they stole:
Their villain, Silas, is Matthias. Literally, that's it. He's Matthias.
Silas is an immortal man who's been alive for almost 200 years and was a member of the Westchester cult, where he knew Cora. Matthias is an immortal man who's been alive 200+ years and was a member of the Westchester cult, where he knew Cora. Silas wants to sacrifice redfield Noah due to his connection to the Power as part of a complicated ritual he's put together in order to... I'm not quite sure what, exactly, as the story was a bit hard to follow. Matthias wants to sacrifice Rowan, due to their connection to the Power, as part of a complicated ritual he's put together in order to gain more power and freedom and heal the corrupted Power. Silas thinks heās all manipulative and the main crew states that "Heās getting us to do his work for him!ā Matthias thinks he's all manipulative, and gloats about being a "puppet master" and getting people to do his work for him.
And then there's his appearance. That's literally the same hairstyle - even has the part on the same side and the same curly swoops. He's the same age. Same race. Literally, just like Connor in their story is a recognizable AI-version of his in-game sprite, that's what Silas looks like to Matthias. All he's missing is the beard.
The gang's base of operations is Coraās cabin
This one is interesting. It's such a tiny detail, and I'd grown so used to the cabin being their safe place that when Connor was like "We need to get back to the cabin" it literally took me a moment to realize - wait. They had nothing to do with that cabin in the original series. Using that as a home base was literally our idea, an It Lives Within original.
The main enemies are mind controlled townspeople working for Silas
Instead of following the precedent of the previous games and having the enemies be Power-twisted animal monsters, they decided to make their enemies humans that are mind-controlled into zombie-like beings with that attack the gang in hordes. This is a rip-off of It Lives Within's horrors, which are power-corrupted townsfolk that Matthias takes advantage of to oppose the main crew. And on top of that, they copied the carnival scene where Harper drives through a horde of horrors, including a scene where Devon drives through a horde of mind-controlled/zombified townsfolk.
Noah and Devon's relationship
Their relationship in this '"TV show" has suspicious similarities to their friendship/romance routes in ILW. They made Devon be redfield Noah's anchor to reality, and even had Devon use memories to help ground Noah, which we showed in the cabin scene where Devon and Noah play baseball together. And I know there were Noah x Devon shippers outside of me before ILW released, but it was never PB's plan to canonize them. So the fact that they are seemingly changing course to canonize them after they grew so popular in the fan version feels a bit too coincidental.
Scraping fan art for their AI animation frames
But what's even more egregious is that they have even stooped to scraping from fan artists, who have nowhere near the same following or exposure as our project does. Seriously, what are the odds that the MC they choose to use matches this artist's MC's race, gender, hair, and outfit exactly, that they used Noah's old outfit, that they are literally positioned on the same sides of the image? It's blatant plagiarism, and it's despicable. @errajay I'm so sorry they did this.
These are the biggest similarities, but considering that it was only like 15 minutes of content, that means that a high percentage of the story was stolen. Sure, the exact details of "Silas's" plan are different (he's like a horcrux for the "entity" aka power and he was split into 43 parts and Noah's one of his parts and he needs to kill him to get it back and be free or something) it's the same concept: immortal man who's trapped making a complicated ritual requiring sacrifice while manipulating people to get everything into place.
If you want to see for yourselves, please find it on YouTube. Do not support them with clicks or traffic on their app. Thank you! Oh, and just in case anyone was wondering, no AI was used in the drafting of this post š
hero homecoming is genuinely an evil product. like wdym youāre going to make a sequel to an customizable interactive fiction story but itās only with the MC as a white straight female with the default name and the romance is forced to be locked to only one of the characters (probably the white male option), if itās even there at all. thereās absolutely no care or consideration for any player who played any different than that.
donāt even get me started on how the original canon MC on the cover of book 1 is NOT white and now she suddenly is for book 2 and theyāre promoting it with āsheās back better than beforeā type messaging.
and of course, the giant ugly elephant in the room of being the soulless AI slop. taking a perfectly fine script that was created by the original writers years ago with deliberate care and thought, and churning it through ChatGPT so that it can become watered down one minute episodes of brainrot. every aspect of it looks horrible: the art, the voices, the dialogue, no consistency in the plot, faces, or art style to be found anywhere.
the QA team approving this (also AI):
i would say iām surprised this was even released, with how godawful it is. but iām going to be honest, i donāt think they even care. this literally took zero effort or money to make, nostalgia bait seems to be the new meta, the script has been sitting in a dusty closet for years, why not make a quick cash grab at practically no cost.
and yeahā¦these posts are basically all AI video shorts. and would you look at that, this app is owned by Series Entertainment too
hero iām so sorry for what theyāre about to do to youā¦
iām wondering if this is what they were talking about with the ānew immersiveā experience they were teasing in their latest ominious choices insiders post
Did you try Spellfyre? The game by ex Choices employees?
I have not. Iāve been meaning to try it when I get some time. If Iām being honest, the LIs donāt really intrigue me too much from what Iāve seen, but iāll give it a shot and see. Iām interested to see how it differs from the Elementalists and other Choices games.
Choices on why they do single-LI books even though they know (they outright acknowledge) that players want choices (even though they act like we demand āLOTSā of LIs as if we constantly expect them to give us 6+ LIs instead of, like, 2-4 sometimes):
I get what youāre saying, but,,, thatās the point. That an LIsā romancers get scenes that non-romancers donāt and that non-romancers donāt get scenes for LIs theyāre not that interested in is the point.
Iām not trying to diminish the work that the writers put in, but you canāt write for the choose-your-own-whatever genre and get frustrated that every player isnāt seeing every single line of dialogue or every last scene. The entire nature of the genre is that you only get the path you go down, and if you did such a good job that the writing is so compelling or appealing, the player might just be drawn to replay over and over again to get every last scene anyway. If you find that youāre forcing your readers down a certain path so none of your writing goes unappreciated, you just wanna write regular stories and should ditch the pretense of choice, and rename the app while youāre at it.
You can play on any Android phones or tablets, and on any computer (PC, Linux, iMac).
iOS users on iPhone or iPad : sorry we couldn't make it work š Packaging for IOS implies some cost that we cant afford.
We would LOVE to read and see your reactions: feel free to post about your play and take as many screenshots as you want!
Use the tag #te3-project so we can find your posts easily.
We recommend playing the official Book 1, Book 2 and Winter's Past Book first as our book immediately follow and continue those story.
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Disclaimer: This is a demo, which means there may be bugs, grammatical or spelling mistakes, and a few changes with the final and finished version.
If you have any suggestions, if you spot any bugs or mistake, please let us know through here on Tumblr or on Reddit!
How to play the demo?
Follow the link to itch.io. Download the version that fit your device.
You may get a security warning for virus or unsafe file: please ignore it and proceed with the downloading and installing.
Once installed, click on the app icon and enjoy your play!
āGo to hellā is basic. āI hope your favorite classic Choices book gets resurrected as a shallow ghost of its original self that nobody asked for with inexplicable anime-style ai art and a whitewashed main characterā is smart. Itās possible. Itās terrifying. It's happening right now.
