Gamedec – -apkrig

Welcome to Warsaw City, a technologically advanced city in the 22nd century, where the line between reality and play is blurred. Crime is rampant in both the real world and the virtual, and criminal practices sometimes intersect across spheres. And that’s where you are – a private investigator whose jurisdiction extends to both worlds. A case is just coming at you that will draw you into something much bigger than you could ever expect.

Book as a video game in a video game

The smaller Polish studio Anshar came out on the Kickstarter last year with an interesting isometric RPG called Gamedec, which at first glance may resemble the fantastic Disco Elysium, either in terms of genre or the absence of any combat mode. Your investigation, tracking and correctly chosen questions play a key role here, although the latter in particular is contradictory, because there is no such thing as a bad question. Your behavior will open some doors for you and close them again, but it will always move you in some direction.

The cyberpunk world of cunning detectives is not a new brand. Polish sci-fi author Marcin Sergiusz Przybyłek created the Gamedec book trilogy, from which the play is based. Doesn’t the story of a Polish writer adapted into an ambitious RPG remind you of another brand…?

A detective of two worlds

But let’s leave Geralt of Rivia aside and go back to Warsaw. In the beginning, you can choose your nameless detective and assign him some basic character traits that give your character some basis, but still everything depends on how you behave in the game. If you expect an action ride, you will be disappointed anyway. Gamedec is a fun game and action sequences are simply not there. This is a lengthy detective work, where interrogations of characters, gathering evidence and subsequent decisions play a key role.

The game takes place on two levels: In the real world, called Realium, and in that virtual name Virtualium. The story takes you to several virtual realities, but the investigation won’t miss you in Realia either.

The individual virtual worlds could not be more different and will always bring something new. They all have their own unique atmosphere – in a farming game you meet players who take care of their fields and the same option is offered to you. The dirty alleys of the game, where it is mainly sexual services of all kinds (greetings to you, Unicorn!), Again tormented me with an unpleasant and sometimes repulsive atmosphere of corruption.

The game contains a total of four detective cases that will take you across Virtual and Realia. Although at first glance the cases are not related, over time everything is interconnected and the story is intertwined and enriched.

But now comes my biggest problem with the whole game. The first two cases are absolutely excellent and well written. In addition, you feel an overlap in them, when topics that are still relevant to us are being addressed. But the second half of the game seemed to me to run out of hard drive – the decline in screenwriting quality is really significant. And that’s a damn shame.

In the footsteps of beauty or destruction

The climax of the game is then successful again and each of the six potential ends is interesting in its own way, even if you lock some of them with your decisions. And what are the decisions? Well, in general, it stems from interrogating individual people or player avatars, and the game’s biggest asset is interviews, in which you have to gain someone’s trust to tell you everything you want to know. You can either flatter the interrogated person in such a way that he reveals his cards to you, or you can derail him so much that he starts to hate you and some information slips in his rage.

Both routes are relevant and adequate tactics must be chosen for each prey. It can also happen that the character absolutely stops communicating with you, and you lock a clue that could help you decipher the case.

You compose the individual tracks using your own deduction, and I really enjoyed that your choice is irreversible. It happened to me that I came to the wrong conclusion and the game just led me in the wrong direction, as if everything was fine.

This creates a great feeling that every decision counts and every “mistake” will take you somewhere. You will always find out the result of the investigation on the local television after the completion of the case, and I was often surprised by what all my actions caused.

It all depends

As I have already written, at the beginning you will have to choose what basic character traits your detective will have. The choice will then be reflected in how many points you will have in each of the four available categories. Through these points, you will later unlock new capabilities that open up other options for conducting investigations.

The categories express the different qualities of your detective: determination, creative thinking, analytical thinking and social feeling. It should be noted that to open up other communication options, it is necessary to collect points in all four categories – points, which are usually obtained during the dialogues according to your answers. Sometimes, even for a completely banal answer, you will receive a reward that can serve you very well in the future.

Sometimes, however, the choice of answers I found was a bit confusing, and even though I was concentrating on collecting points, for example, I suddenly a point of analytical thinking landed in my lap and then I suffered from an excess of points that could not be spent because I lacked points in something that I couldn’t get God.

The features to unlock are interesting, and best of all, people will respond to you. As a healer, you can treat an injured girl who will start to trust you easily, but with the celebrity skill unlocked, the girl sees her idol in you and reveals more than she originally wanted.

Beauty despite mistakes

Unlike the very pleasing graphic jacket, which breathes cyberpunk in all directions, I was not pleasantly surprised by the technical condition. The game bit me a few times in such a way that I had to load the old saved position. After the first cut, which took me back about three hours, I saved every ten minutes, but even so, such an error surprised me unpleasantly. The same can be said for the music, which sometimes dropped out completely, sometimes did not stop playing again, although it was clear that a spectacular concert should definitely not take place here.

Nevertheless, Gamedec is a hilarious game. The world itself in the relatively near future is helping to do this, thanks in part to a huge, sophisticated code that constantly provides new information about how everything around you works. I definitely recommend not missing this pleasant reading.

And we must not forget the greatest triumph of all – Gamedec is an original, mostly well-written RPG, in which you will not fight, but think and persuade. If you decide “wrong”, the game counts on it and does not slap you through the Game Over monitor. And it surprisingly works!

I almost feel as if a new genre is emerging before our eyes (in which we can easily retrospectively include, for example, both Torments) – a role-playing game in which you are not a hero at all. At least not in a way that you would come and mow everything with a pistol or sword. It’s really worth living, or at least trying.