Façade is an interactive drama video game, structured as a one-act story about a married couple, Trip and Grace.

[4] The game uses text input to facilitate discussions with Trip and Grace, utilizing various artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that determine how the two respond to the player and each other.

Another is a "drama manager", which creates story beats from a set of preprogrammed events and finds ways, using the player's input, to raise tension and resolve the conflict.

[5][6] Façade also incorporates natural language processing, identifying certain key words in player input and deducing the context behind what they are trying to say.

Prior to development, Mateas was a doctoral student at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, and Stern was a programmer and designer on the virtual pet video game series Petz.

[7] Intended as a commercial product, Stern noted that The Party required investment to fund a small team of designers and programmers necessary to create the game's artificial intelligence.

Adams praised Façade for being unlike most video games at the time, highlighting its lack of a victory condition and focus on personal relationships that he found believable.

[26][27] As Set Schiesel, who did the New York Times review, wrote: "[this] is a future where games are driven as strongly by characters as combat [and] as much soap opera as shooting gallery".

[27] Other publications covered the game's open-ended nature and praised how the player could change the story in real time instead of adhering to a pre-determined narrative branch.

Retrospective assessments of Façade have recognized the game's technical achievement in its application of artificial intelligence and popular appeal.

[10] Similarly, The Guardian cited Façade as an "interesting" milestone and "fascinating experiment" in the advancement of emotional artificial intelligence.

[29] Throughout the decade since its release, Façade developed a cult following and spawned several Internet memes, largely due to "Let's Play" videos on YouTube that exploited Grace and Trip's awkward reactions to what the AI deemed inappropriate behavior, which was sometimes nonsensical.

[10] Some retrospective reviews have expressed mixed views on Façade's execution as a simulation of interpersonal interaction, with Rock Paper Shotgun observing that the subsequent influence of the game on the broader industry had been largely overstated.