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KickStarter Gamedec - Definitive Edition - cyberpunk detective RPG set in virtual worlds

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth


This game seems to be triggering some people: https://www.rpgsite.net/preview/10042-gamedec-preview

Gamedec Preview

Within the games industry, the term ‘cyberpunk’ has become increasingly popular and the market is flooded with games offering what developers feel is the real cyberpunk experience. It’s safe to say that the word has become less of a genre defined by politics and the struggles of the underrepresented and more of a descriptor used to define games with a slick, technologically advanced aesthetic. With Gamedec coming to PC later this year, I was excited to test it out to see if this ‘adaptive cyberpunk RPG’ would fall victim to the cyberpunk curse or if it would rise above the rest and provide a truly nuanced experience.

Gamedec is a traditional isometric, point-and-click game. I played as a man simply called Gamedec (short for game detective), and my job was to solve the crimes committed in various virtual worlds. Gathering clues adds to the codex which tracks anything from characters met, to organizations and viewpoints on the virtual world, gaming, etc. From there you can make deductions based on the information you have, and those deductions decide the path you’ll take and which actions are available to you. Having less info means there are less avenues to investigate. While moving through an investigation, nothing feels right or wrong. Rather it feels like a genuine experience of simply going on what you know. I never felt like I was chasing the wrong lead or that the game was directing me to the right conclusion. It was a pretty natural experience.






Starting out, Gamedec immediately reveals what kind of world it’s creating. Just from moving around the apartment I started in, I was able to see just how adaptive the game is. Choices are vast, although simplistic, and each time a different path was taken, the game changed and provided even more options. Stylistically, the apartment is what you would expect from a cyberpunk video game in 2020. Everything was automated, machines were sentient and I had an AI companion to sort out my housing needs.

This is where I started to notice a somewhat concerning pattern. Gamedec runs on a rather strict binary in terms of gender and ideology. As a male character, my only option for an AI assistant was a conventionally attractive, shapely blue android named Bliss. Whether this is the game's design or simply what was available in the preview, it struck me as odd why I was only able to have a woman as an AI and not a man or even something not human (a choice in the game that was greyed out to me).





Continuing through the preview, I was tasked with figuring out why an incredibly wealthy and shady man's son was trapped in his virtual reality. The same strange, juvenile focus on sex was seen in this case as I had to travel to a world that mixed “violence and sex” to figure out why this mans 16-year-old child was trapped in the erotic game he logged into.

Conversations with side characters are full of indulgent references to sex, existence, and gamers. It’s less nihilistic and more as if the game is saying ‘this is what it’s like to be a Cool Guy...who also plays games’, with offensive terms and bizarrely placed moments of misogyny included.






Exploring this virtual world felt like working through a man's power fantasy. While most characters felt distinct on a surface level, the game made sure men were aggressive and confident while women were sexy to the point of objectification, and they could only discuss the ways in which sex rules society. The few characters who went against this norm ended up feeling weak and undeserving of status in the simulation.

I had major issues with the world Gamedec is building, but I will say that it’s detailed in a way I wasn’t expecting. With the many many branching paths I could take, Gamedec holds up on the claim that choices and consequences matter. Playing recklessly or trying to push my way through every situation aggressively didn’t always work. Being a kinder detective in certain situations gave me more insight and opened more deduction paths. The dialogue options sometimes felt repetitive, but generally, the branching dialogue system worked effectively. While some aspects of the deduction chart and skill tree felt a bit stiff, it could have easily been because I was simply playing a preview where certain aspects of the game weren’t available to me. At the end of the day, my choices directly affected my playthrough. That I can appreciate and it’s the one part of the game I’m curious to see when it’s fully released.






Gamedec is an interesting mix of highly interactive dialogue trees and ridiculously dated writing. Taking on a TTRPG style of character origin and offering direct consequences to the type of character you play is a good move. With those two features, I can only imagine the finished product being a robust game with high replay value. I’m simply on the fence about how the story evolves, or devolves. The lack of interesting characters and the insistence that sex dominates each conversation is concerning. The surface-level aesthetic or design of the world was a bit disappointing. While I spent most of my time in one world, I am curious as to how the rest of the game will play out, and if the narrative grows and matures throughout. There’s space for this game to become something big, but major changes need to happen.
 
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compvet24

Educated
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May 17, 2020
Messages
83
Interesting, he/she/goblin beast made some actual criticisms in some parts but allowed the whole piece to be completely drowned out by cries of misogyny/state mandated talking points.
"Concerning pattern" bahahaha you can't help but laugh at it.
 
Vatnik Wumao
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Interesting, he/she/goblin beast made some actual criticisms in some parts but allowed the whole piece to be completely drowned out by cries of misogyny/state mandated talking points.
"Concerning pattern" bahahaha you can't help but laugh at it.
You know what they say about broken clocks... :M
 

Longes

Augur
Joined
Jan 13, 2013
Messages
388
I am utterly astonished that a game (within a game) that's all about the fantasy of rampant sex and violence contained... rampant sex and violence. Like what the fuck man.
It's like that time I went to an erotic roleplay forum and everyone on it played a slutty hot person. Disgusting! Where were the good christian morals of those people?!

Clearly they should have released the Farmville virtualium as the demo. I bet that one is a free-for-all for wanking about slaves and capitalism.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Messages
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.kickstarter.com/project...berpunk-rpg-set-in-xxii-century/posts/2935283

Gamedec on Gamescom 2020 and Indie Arena Booth

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GAMESCOM AWARDS 2020

Although Gamescom and Indie Arena Booth are yet about to start, we've already been nominated as one of the show's best RPG titles. Gamedec is standing next to Cyberpunk 2077 and Cris Tales, which is an excellent recognition of our work. We appreciate the opportunity to show our game to a broader audience.

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Winners will be revealed during the gamescom: Best Of Show event on August 30 from 8:00 p.m.
Be sure to watch the Opening Night Live [2:00 p.m. CEST] here: youtube.com/user/mygamescom

Indie Arena Booth
What is Indie Arena Booth? Part convention, part multiplayer online experience. It's an opportunity to bolster visibility for indie devs, to bring press, players, and creators together, and of course, to play a lot of amazing games! This Indie Arena Booth will take place entirely online with our biggest selection of games ever, giving every developer the opportunity to take part.

We're bringing Gamedec, and you are all welcome to join us from the 27th to the 30th of August :) Our exhibition will be one of a kind! You can check the montage of the booth building below:

Our booth will look like an alley from Low City location from the game with a Yeti's bar in the middle. We prepared many NPCs you can talk to, and many objects you can interact with to learn more about the lore or the game itself.

For those, who didn't pledge our Kickstarter on time or just want to share the joy of plating Gamedec with their friends, we are starting a giveaway, where you can win access to the closed beta build. Be sure to share it with your friends!

Furthermore, we've prepared two live-streams. One will be conducted by our Community Manager, Mateusz - it will be an unscripted walkthrough, where the chat is making some of the decisions as we move forward in the investigation. Will we fail? Will we succeed? The second stream will have guests from our dev team - Marcin Przybyłek [the Author of the book saga], and Magdalena Cielecka, our producer on Gamedec.

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If you like to watch streams, we will provide a pre-recorded footage showing streamers who enjoyed Gamedec on their first playthrough. These streams will be looped on Gamedec's Steam Page so hop on in whenever you'll have a chance!

Website: indiearenabooth.de

GOG.com stream
Moreover – we're sending our dear Krzysztof to a Lovelust Games live stream to talk more about the game. Join them on Friday, the 30th of August, at 5 p.m. CEST.

That's another opportunity to send your questions to the chat and discuss them with one of Anshar Studio's crew members.

That's all for today Keep your fingers crossed for our nomination and visit us during the Indie Arena Booth event! These are exciting times for our team, and we are going to do our best to provide an unforgettable experience to every visitor.

We might have something extra in our sleeves, so be sure to follow our Social Media channels!
 

Zyondyne

Learned
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Aug 11, 2019
Messages
101
Free demo available on Steam this weekend.

Just entered the topic to write that, but Infinitron was faster, as expected :)

Didn't even know Gamescom is taking place today. Will definitely try it and I'm curious to hear your reviews.
 

Bad Sector

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Messages
2,223
Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Downloaded the demo from GOG, it looks great but it feels very janky and the gamepad controls both awful and horribly broken (in that most of the time the game doesn't respond at all - e.g. supposedly you can scroll the text with the right stick but it doesn't do anything - or it does the wrong thing). Mouse seems to work but it feels floaty and sometimes clicking doesn't register.

Also i think at some point it crashed and the game went directly to the 'hey this is a demo, kthxbye' screen - that or the game had a very abrupt ending while i was talking with the guy in the first virtualium you visit.

Beyond that it reminded me of the Shadowrun games with some additional gameplay elements (the deduction stuff) and a more gameplay oriented dialog system (you can interrogate people and there is a "progress bar" that can go from the middle towards left or right where, as i understand it, the character dislikes or likes you and passing some points you unlock facts).

In general the idea seems interesting, perhaps the final game will be good after some patches.
 

Matt [Anshar Studios]

Anshar Studios
Developer
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Aug 8, 2019
Messages
61
Downloaded the demo from GOG, it looks great but it feels very janky and the gamepad controls both awful and horribly broken (in that most of the time the game doesn't respond at all - e.g. supposedly you can scroll the text with the right stick but it doesn't do anything - or it does the wrong thing). Mouse seems to work but it feels floaty and sometimes clicking doesn't register.

Also i think at some point it crashed and the game went directly to the 'hey this is a demo, kthxbye' screen - that or the game had a very abrupt ending while i was talking with the guy in the first virtualium you visit.

The demo is a pre-alpha build, and it's time-limited - you will have just a brief taste of the Twisted & Perverted before the demo takes you to the end screen. We are doing a gleam giveaway for a backer's build [with no time limit] -> https://gleam.io/sFBah/gamedec-beta-access
 

Bad Sector

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Messages
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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
The demo is a pre-alpha build, and it's time-limited - you will have just a brief taste of the Twisted & Perverted before the demo takes you to the end screen.

Ah, i see. I was looking around the office area, so that brief taste lasted only a few seconds in my case and the switch happened right after i selected a choice in a dialog so i thought the game crashed :-P

I was thinking about adding some comment in the GOG forum about the game but then i noticed that the demo links to GOG's general discussion, which would make it hard to see things about the game specifically. But since you are here, please try to improve the gamepad controls (e.g. allow selecting stuff with the dpad and use some context-sensitive actions for the four buttons). The UI layout seems fine overall, it is mainly a matter of mapping.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Messages
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth


https://www.kickstarter.com/project...berpunk-rpg-set-in-xxii-century/posts/2938441

Gamedec Nintendo Switch Version Announced!

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Hey There!

As always, Gamescom is full of a lot of information, announcements, trailers, and exciting materials.

We even won the 1st place in the Indie Awards at Devcom!

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If you've been attentive and watching this year's virtual edition of Gamescom 2020 and Indie Arena Booth 2020, you might already hear the latest news at IGN Live X Gamescom or at the Daily Show, which looks back on everything revealed today. One of these announcements was about Gamedec, and it's something pretty awesome!

We are pleased to announce that we'll be bringing Gamedec to Nintendo Switch in 2021!
Our team could not be more excited to share that information with you. Whether you've been waiting to play, missed the Kickstarter Campaign, or just waited for any console version announcements – this is something BIG for us. This means that more people won't miss the chance to become a Gamedec and solve crimes committed in virtual worlds - this time - on the go, wherever you be, whenever you want! Can you imagine the possibility of playing the game on Nintendo’s most popular handheld?

Watch the brand new trailer with the announcement below.

Pretty exciting news, right? Time for some explanation why the first console announcement is the Switch:

In April, in the final days from the Campaign, we announced the last stretch goal, which was the Nintendo Switch version. We didn't make it, because of the timing - it was announced too late to reach out to all the players interested in the handheld version of our game. We received tons of messages and heard you loud and clear – you really want the Switch version of the game. While we listened to the community's feedback and sat down to discuss it further at a later date the idea which came up was this. After all - we've mentioned that the console versions of the game are planned, and since we know that you liked the idea of getting into the world of gamedecverse anywhere you want - we'll make that happen. And don't worry - we'd love to bring the game to other platforms.

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There's no specific release date for the Switch version ... yet.
As far as timing goes, we'll provide you with a more specific date; however, It's important to remember that we are a small team, and we want to focus on finishing the game for the PCs - that's why we made the Campaign for. We are currently working on analyzing the feedback we are constantly receiving from you via the Backer Surveys – be sure to fill them up, those are very important to us and it helps us make a better game! Soon we will reveal some of the information we’ve gathered during the last month!

As you may see, we've announced that the NS version will be brought to you later in 2021.

The time for the specific NS release date will come, and we ask you for some patience. Stay tuned!

This also means that you won't be able to change your platform of choice on backerkit since this is only the announcement of the next platform the game will be available on.
 
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Rahdulan

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Maybe it was something on my end, but lack of sound overall made for a dull demo experience. I do like what I've seen, though. Makes me wonder if Glazier and Infotainer will turn out to be the "correct" classes to play going by the number of relevant dialog options tied to them compared to maybe a handful of Sleeve ones available to me.
 

Matt [Anshar Studios]

Anshar Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 8, 2019
Messages
61
The demo is a pre-alpha build, and it's time-limited - you will have just a brief taste of the Twisted & Perverted before the demo takes you to the end screen.
But since you are here, please try to improve the gamepad controls (e.g. allow selecting stuff with the dpad and use some context-sensitive actions for the four buttons). The UI layout seems fine overall, it is mainly a matter of mapping.

I will pass it to the team - thanks :)

Maybe it was something on my end, but lack of sound overall made for a dull demo experience. I do like what I've seen, though. Makes me wonder if Glazier and Infotainer will turn out to be the "correct" classes to play going by the number of relevant dialog options tied to them compared to maybe a handful of Sleeve ones available to me.
This is just a fraction of the game, so other classes might become handy later on. And remember, that some of the dialogue options are hidden behind different approaches. If you're a sleeve, you should intimidate in the first dialogue options, and then push even harder when a second option becomes available.
 

Herumor

Scholar
Joined
May 1, 2018
Messages
553
Managed about 16 minutes into the game, barely logged into Twisted & Perverted before being thrown out from the game world.

I was following the videos on this for quite a while now, and I've seen what the options were when you actually do get inside T&P, but still, this is way too short for a demo. You're not really gonna get people interested in the game with this, it's an abrupt and unpleasant experience. I'm hooked personally because, like I said before, I've been following the development of the game for a while now and like what I saw, but anyone being just told of this game existing and there being a demo might not feel like sticking around. Consider implementing an actual cut off point rather than timegating it.
 

Matt [Anshar Studios]

Anshar Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 8, 2019
Messages
61
Herumor Demo was time-limited for the purpose of the event, and right now, it's not available anymore. Backers, however, have access to the extended version without any timer. Like I said in a different thread, I'm not quite sure why someone cut the demo in this way. I'd give people at least 10 minutes more to get a taste of the Twisted & Perverted. I will raise this topic on our next meeting, to make people aware of the backlash. Sorry for the inconvenience, though.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Demo will be available during PAX Online as well: https://steamcommunity.com/games/917720/announcements/detail/2888451713657238500

September is not slowing us down - Gamedec on various events
We're bringing Gamedec to many world-wide events this month. Take a ride with us!

Hi there!

The past week had a blast. In case you missed it, during Gamescom, we announced the Nintendo Switch version of Gamedec! (Read it Here!) But there is no time to celebrate - we're bringing our game to many world-wide events this month. Since the pandemic changed the way we proceed with the events a little, we can showcase our game in many ways. There are events for the Chinese community, Japanese, English-speaking countries, and more!

Below you'll find the list of the events we are currently participating in:

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Try Gamedec demo version during PAX Online!

You'll have a chance to play the demo version of Gamedec on Steam, from 12 to 20 September! If you had no option to do that during Gamescom, keep the dates in your calendar! The demo you will play is part of the case, available in the full version for our Kickstarter backers. In this scenario, you are asked by Geoffrey Haggis to come and uncover the mystery of what is happening to his son, Fredo Haggis. Fredo has been inside the virtualium for a long time, and it seems like he is actually in danger. Even if it's just a glimpse of the whole case, you can experience how the investigation can take a different course, depending on your decisions during the playthrough. Gamedec gives you the freedom to approach situations from multiple angles rather than forcing a single solution.

We are also preparing many activities for those events. Expect a special developer-interview during the Sonkwo Online event (Link HERE). This is the perfect opportunity for our Chinese community to get familiar with the game. You can also participate in and try the demo version within the Sonkwo platform.

Also, we’re preparing livestreams during the PAX Online with the dev team on board. We will invite you to participate in those conversations as we would also like to bring our colleagues from other game dev studios for a talk. That’s the spirit of the PAX event, right? It’s also worth mentioning that Gamedec is the selected Indie title in the PAX Indie Showcase! The game has been picked as one of the 20 titles from over 350 indie games.

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Check out more details here: https://online.paxsite.com/indie

Let’s switch the part of our globe and virtually join Digital Dragons that generally take place in Cracow, Poland. During the event, we’ll be “fighting” for the award in two categories - Best Indie Game and Community Vote. Especially in the second category, with your help, Gamedec have the chance to win the prizes. We’ll keep you up to date, how you can support the title during the event.

As for the Tokyo Games Show, we are preparing video content for the Japanese speakers. Since there is still some time left, more details about the event will be provided soon via our social media channels.

It’s a pity that we cannot connect with you in real life and share some high fives on expo floors. Now let’s imagine how the events in the 22nd century will look like. Maybe we will meet all together in a virtual world, resembling Seattle’s Washington State Convention Center from PAX West?

----

If you'd like to talk with our team members, want to ask a question to the Author of the Gamedecverse (Marcin S. Przybyłek), or chat with enthusiasts like you - join our Discord channel.

 

Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.pcgamer.com/gamedec-aims-to-be-cyberpunk-disco-elysium/

Gamedec aims to be cyberpunk Disco Elysium
Does it succeed? No, but it's better for trying.

There are a variety of different worlds in 'virtualium', the VR cyberspace of Gamedec—like farming simulation Harvest Time, where players trade the crowded streets of near-future Warsaw for a pastoral dream. I'm a long way from Harvest Time, however. I'm in Twisted & Perverted, a seedy gameworld where everyone is either too busy trying to hook up with someone else to care about my questions, or too interested in trying to hook up with me to follow the thread of my conversation. I feel like I'm trapped in horny jail.

Gamedec is short for 'game detective', which is someone who privately investigates crimes committed in virtual realities like these. It's a job, and also the name of a game, based on a series of books by Polish author Marcin Przybyłek. It does have a very "translated from Polish" vibe. I think 'gamedec' sounds kind of silly, but then I used to think the same about 'witcher.'

I'm playing a demo of Gamedec that contains one of several cases that will make up the finished game. It begins with a CEO who wants me to figure out why his teenage son is trapped in virtual reality. The kid's been strapped to a couch for hours, his vital signs hovering on the brink of danger. Unplugging him could be harmful, but what other way is there to log him off?

As I check the kid's health and examine the equipment (his name is Fredo Haggis by the way), his father presses me for an explanation. There's a limit to how much I can investigate before he forces me to arrive at a conclusion, and other scenes in Gamedec play out the same way. Impatient witnesses only answer a certain number of questions, software only tolerates a certain amount of probing. Being forced to make decisions under pressure makes you consider which approach is most likely to pay off, and raises the tension—which is important, because Gamedec doesn't have a combat system, the traditional fallback for RPGs wanting to make you feel threatened.

That's one of the ways it's like Disco Elysium. Another is that your personality and skills are directly connected. The skill tree looks like a brain, with abilities that can be unlocked by spending aspect points gained by making choices that reflect that aspect. To unlock medical skills I need to say and do things that demonstrate trust, compassion, and listening. To become a better hacker I need discretion, calm, and loneliness.

It's kind of the reverse of Disco Elysium, where each of your skills had a personality. Here, your personality traits determine your skills.

Another way Gamedec ramps up tension is with interrogations, special conversations where you need to convince an NPC to spill their secrets. Padlocks appear spread across a UI bar you start at the center of, representing those secrets. When I interrogate Fredo's scared friend Timmy I travel to the right along the bar as I reassure him, then veer left whenever I say something frightening. Pursue one or the other far enough and the padlocks open one by one as he spills his guts.

Later, when the case takes me to horny jail, an interrogation scene with a dominatrix swaps this format. She's in charge of the conversation, but by choosing responses that follow either a submissive or combative line far enough, I can get her to open up.

Gamedec also gamifies your investigation with its deductions screen, where questions about the next step of the case are represented as connected circles. Discovered clues fill gaps next to the relevant questions, but I don't need to find all the clues to answer the questions posed—once I've got enough I select an answer, which opens up certain dialogue options with witnesses. There's no way to go back and change your mind about a deduction if later clues contradict it, meaning some conversation options you might want to ask will be grayed-out forever if you leap to the wrong conclusion.

Gamedec is yet another cyberpunk videogame where you play the authority figure who cracks down on the hackers and punks rather than vice versa. It's also another cyberpunk game where the future brings shocking societal changes except for when it comes to beauty standards for women, which somehow regress several decades. Every woman's look is basically "1980s Playmate but with a tattoo maybe" and the AI assistant is a naked blue lady (the option to select a male AI is unavailable in the demo). Perhaps the less kinky virtual worlds will be more original.

While it has superficial similarities to Disco Elysium, the writing is plain rather than poetic, and sometimes grammatically clumsy. It's suddenly on point, however, when the topic is gaming. My shabby detective has a collection of expensive spaceships he can't afford in an unfinished game called Void Stars, and when I unearth the king of the online trolls he sends me on a parody of fetch quests. When Gamedec is about games, suddenly the writing becomes arch and pointed, benefiting from familiarity. Part of the investigation involves figuring out whether a hack inserted in this gameworld is based on exploiting an existing bug or running an external cheat program, a detail I can't imagine mattering if this were a TV show rather than a game.

It's also the work of designers who value reactive NPCs and branching storylines. In a playthrough where I didn't find the Troll King I deduced the identity of a cult leader who had the same information, and rather than carefully rescuing a woman trapped in VR I riskily yanked off her headset, which left her in a coma. The slideshow epilogue at the end of the case played out very differently each time.

My time in Twisted & Perverted has exposed a fetish of mine, and it's games with slideshows that tell you what happened to every faction or settlement or whatever. For that I'll apparently forgive a fair amount of weakness in writing and how it handles the themes it explores.

In all honesty, Gamedec is the kind of 7/10 RPG small European studios specialize in. It's just one that hasn't bolted on a combat system to distract from its better qualities. Combat adds friction to narrative games, but it often becomes a crutch. Plot scene, fight scene, exploration zone, fight scene—a pattern that becomes familiar, and then contemptible. "Oh hey, this room has waist-high walls in it, guess I'm about to be ambushed again."

It would be nice if the lasting impact of Disco Elysium was an explosion of fanciful games with writing better than most novels. But if it also meant the studios that make Eurojank RPGs were inspired to concentrate more on what they're good at—reactivity and creative systems that suit the genre, rather than boss battles and endless loot—then that would be nice too.

Gamedec is aiming for a 2020 release on Steam and GOG. A demo will be available on Steam as part of PAX Online from September 12 to September 20.
 
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Kaivokz

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Messages
1,499
Booted up the demo.

World looks very nice: more lived in and detailed than the Harebrained Schemes games. They've got the "high city" part of cyberpunk right. I didn't see any low city. The portraits are well done. The UI is pretty minimal.

The VR "evolution of gaming" stuff reminds me a bit of the Zoku from Hannu Rajaniemi's Quantum Thief. I've never read the source material for this game.

The style of writing is overall good, played pretty straight and to the point, though maybe a bit reliant on info-dumps at the start (could just be a demo thing). So far no paragraphs of purple prose.

There is an inference mini-game where you can unlock secrets relevant to what you're investigating. I don't know if they are all structured like this, but the demo interrogation is in the form of 'good cop/bad cop'; making the person feel at ease unlocks secrets and making them feel uncomfortable unlocks other secrets. You can go one way and then the other to unlock secrets from either side, and theoretically, if you play out the conversation right, you could make them feel at ease to learn all you can that way, then stress them out to learn more that way—whether or not there are enough dialogue options to ever do this I do not know. The system does encourage you not to pick some options if you're going for a certain angle, which I quite like; if you're pressuring the person, you don't want to appear understanding or make them think about happy things, so the interrogations don't boil down to "just select every option and move on."

Dialogue options are presented as "Mass Effect" style [General idea] rather than spelled out explicitly. For example, meeting with your first client, your options are:
1. [Take initiative]
2. [Introduce yourself]
3. [About the job]
Take initiative = "Mr. Haggis? I'm a gamedec and—" which is then interrupted by the client (I thought [Take initiative] might be more like "What's the job?", "Give me the details", or "Let's get to it"). It can be hard to get the meaning behind various options as it usually is with this kind of system.

It poses a problem when it comes to the inference mini-game; there are two kinds of uncertainty (1) uncertainty about how something you say will affect the person and (2) uncertainty about what you are going to say. The first is a fun part of the system, the second is nothing but a detraction; one shouldn't worry about what words are going to leave their own mouth when interrogating someone. Further, I didn't see a way to go "back" in the dialogue tree, so if you select "Ask about Timmy" and the only option left is "Ask him if he's alright", you need to select it, even if you're trying to be a hardass.

As you go through the mission you pick different 'Deduction' paths (should be induction paths...) based on evidence you've accumulated. For example, in the demo mission you can find out two different VRs to explore, and there's at least one more path you can try to take, but there could be more.

Demo boots you out after 2 minutes inside of a VR (or maybe after selecting any deduction path).


Not a bad experience. Will probably check it out when it releases.
 

fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Jun 2, 2017
Messages
37,087
Location
Bulgaria
Sooo any chance this getting released this decade?
 

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