Subsurface Circular

Subsurface Circular. Video game. Mike Bithell Games, developer, publisher. Dan le Sac, composer. Microsoft Windows (2017), iOS, Nintendo Switch (2018), platforms. Single-player, Text adventure.[1]

Described by Joey Eschrich in a post to the ListServ of the Science Fiction Research Association on 20 July 2020 as "an adventure game about intelligent machines, structural oppression, and public transit [...]. In the game, you unravel a mystery about missing robots by engaging in a series of branching conversations."

Wikipedia entry summarizes under "Gameplay":

Subsurface Circular is a loose take on text-based adventure games, with the game presented in a three-dimensional, third-person perspective. The player controls a robot detective in a futuristic setting, tasked with solving cases aboard a subway system below a human city that ferries around other robots that serve as the workforce. In the game, the robot detective must solve a case of a number of robots that have gone missing, by talking to other robots while they are on the subway cars, following various conversation trees, and at times, solving puzzles to help out a robot and get more information.

There are YouTube videos on the game, and a Google search brings up significant entries beyond the quite thorough coverage in Wikipedia: notably 22 reviews brought together on Metacritic (where the game got a respectable rating of 79/100 from the critics and 7.8/10 for users).[2]

Relevant here —

The sociological and political implications foregrounded in a narrative set "among the city’s robotic working class" (quoting the Metacritic summary). Cf. and contrast theme of robot/workers going back to the source of our word "robot" in R. U. R., and in Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS. 

Consider point-of-view: technically third-person, not first, but intellectually and emotionally from the point of view of the robot detective. Cf. and contrast such works as The Steel Eye; Hydrogen Steel; Isaac Asimov's Inferno, The Naked Sun, and Caliban.

RDE, with thanks to Joey Eschrich, 20/22July20