Did you enjoy Portal but felt that GLaDOS simply wasn’t indifferent enough for you? Is artificial intelligence your favourite kind of intelligence? Do you hate bees? If your answer to any or all of these is yes then SAYER is just the podcast for you! Voiced and produced by Adam Bash, SAYER is part of the Geekly Inc. podcast network and is about the life and times of the residents of Typhon and the A.I., SAYER, who manages the asteroid city/research facility. Each episode is a snapshot of the efficiently run life of one of the residents of Typhon as they interact with the A.I. and may be part of a greater storyline. However, the only constant is SAYER.

The best part of SAYER is simply the tone that it takes, which could be described as HP Lovecraft meets a spreadsheet. It is difficult in single-voiced storytelling to convey the narrative you want to tell and to set a mood, but SAYER manages to do both and do both well. Each episode is effectively a conversation between SAYER and one of the residents but we hear very little from those whom the A.I. is speaking to unless it’s to set a certain ambience. This works very well as the dark humour and horror that the podcast deals in comes more from what the A.I. doesn’t say than what it does say and it’s rather skewed sense of priorities. Bringing this together with a well-realised world makes the podcast highly engaging for its rather one-sided nature.

To keep you listening to the happenings on Typhon the show is littered with running themes, suspicious events and references to backstories as yet unknown. SAYER weaves together a rich tapestry of things that you don’t know and teases you with it. This, peppered with a dose of the weird and unexplained – There are no bees on Typhon, entices you into listening again and again.

The comparison to Welcome to Night Vale is inevitable as both shows share the single narrator format. Despite this, WTNV is simply more than SAYER. It is more disturbing, more funny and weirder. It is more varied which just makes it more fun to listen to. This may be an unfair comparison, but the sheer fact that SAYER warrants a comparison to WTNV shows that the podcast has a great deal going for it. However, it has a couple of weaknesses that brings it down a few notches.

The difficulty with SAYER is that it is so consistent in tone and the nature of its storytelling that it could easily become uninteresting to many potential listeners or even fans. The potential for growth is coupled with a tendency to re-tread old ground which may but potential listeners from investing their time in the backlog of episodes. Lastly, SAYER’s voice, while subtly menacing in exactly the way you want from your unhinged A.I.’s can be dull and its voice being the dominant presence of the podcast may turn people off.

Despite these drawbacks, I would recommend SAYER to all fans of podcasts and audio storytelling and to all bee haters out there. It is a well-produced, solidly written podcasts with a large number of creative and interesting episodes to explore. So, dive in!