It’s time to Hack.
Gamedec is a narrative-driven choice-based detective thriller told within the confines of a cyberpunk world. As the titular game detective, you’ll leave the real world behind as you dive into a series of games, each with their own mystery buried within. With a variety of skills, dialogue options, and branching paths, every adventure here can go one of a dozen ways, allowing you to find your own path through each case. While the game certainly lives up to much of its premise; frequent bugs and other issues, unfortunately, hurt the game in its current state.
While it doesn’t happen very often, I had to delay my Gamedec review due to the pre-release build of the game suffering from a host of problems that actually prevented me from pushing through it, and with more games and more codes coming my way, it saw a further delay in what you’re reading now. I had constant crashes, half-translated dialogue, and text, preventing me from knowing what characters were saying, or what some of my skills even did. Characters would often refer to my character as the wrong gender, or have conversations with me about things that either hadn’t happened yet or about choices I didn’t even make. It was then that I chose to wait until the game saw its official launch and day one patch, addressing most of those issues, and while I had to start over due to my save file just not wanting to load, I still enjoyed a lot of what Gamedec had to offer, even if the game is fairly inconsistent in its quality and largely clunky in its execution.
Despite the freedom you receive in solving many of its cases, the character creation feels remarkably limiting to just a few character models based on some artwork that serves as your dialogue picture. While the artwork in this game is damn impressive; honestly it’s likely its best visual feature, it’s a shame that you were unable to create your own character within the confines of even a few limiting options. You’ll pick your name, pronouns, and backstory, but often, and I mean often, the game will forget that and just refer to you as random monikers whenever it feels like it.
As the titular Gamedec, you’ll receive your jobs through your computer. While these are scripted events, complete with their own host of characters, they will take you into a variety of games that exist within this world. As you lay back into a gaming rig chair, hooked up into cyberspace, you’ll dive into these adventures at the behest of a client, paying you for your Gamedec skills to uncover the truth. It’s then your responsibility to get to the bottom of that truth and find out what has transpired, whether you solve it to the benefit of what the client has requested or through means that go somewhat against their wishes and border on failure.
The missions themselves are interesting enough, but I often found that each case only had maybe one or two characters that were as equally interesting and not just used as a way to grant you a clue if you worked your conversation magic just right. Some missions will have side quests that are generally there to earn critical intel from those wanting something in return. One such example is trying to find a man's wife who he thinks is hiding within a game based around bondage and punishment. Sure enough, his wife is there, but ratting her out may deny you important info that you require from her, so in the favor of the mission, I told him there was no proof she was there, despite my conversation with her a block and some over. Still, I did my mission and gained some information from him in return, so in a sense, it was a win-win scenario for me despite my deception.
Now, clues will lead you to make deductions. You'll gather information from a variety of sources and it will lead you to make assumptions that translate into the facts you have at any given moment. You can even make deductions without having every piece of the puzzle present, making your path not necessarily the correct one, causing the case to maybe go down a path you likely didn't want it to go. The deduction system is similar to the likes of the Sherlock Holmes games, where you play around with clues to get an idea of what is going on. The menu structure for this system is decent, but I think it could have been cleaned up to not take up so many tabs, allowing you to have more information on one screen as opposed to six or seven tabs.
Clues are often found by simply investigating your surroundings and talking with the assortment of characters available in each game. Depending on their circumstance, they may be hiding information from you, forcing you to get creative with how you peel back the layers of how you interact with them. Special characters will have conversation nodes that need to be unlocked by pushing through an interrogation. As you move from one node to the next, they spill more vital information. Some conversations will require that you have certain abilities unlocked as well, purchased through a series of skill currencies. Each of these currencies is represented by a color and each skill requires a certain number of each in order to unlock and then use freely in conversation.
These attributes are earned based on your responses, and you’ll often have to rely on the context of that reply in order to figure out which response will earn you a particular attribute. In most games, responses are usually color-coded to reflect what conversation path you’ve chosen to go down. Here, you have to read between the lines to determine if your response is based on one of the themes of that attribute. If the options were color-coded, I feel I could have found myself working more towards a build as I would know where my conversation was going, but here, sometimes you don’t quite know the context behind some responses and will often earn an attribute point that you were not aiming for, making the procurement of certain skills a lot harder to work towards. Also, as you make your character, you can choose a path that starts you with certain attribute points in each category, making you have access to some perks earlier than others.
Despite the game not having combat, apart from a few kills that are scripted during conversations, your skills will act as your weapons, shooting through certain conversations with a turn of phrase, getting to the heart of the matter. From detecting objects and interactable elements around you, detecting if someone is lying or not, to understanding hard-to-understand programming, you’ll unlock these largely during conversations when they are most needed. Again, earning the attributes themselves can be a bit of trial and error as some attribute points are pretty rare to obtain, but if you save often, you can go back into conversations with more knowledge than before, even if you have to redo entire moments all over again as the autosave system is lacking and rarely saves when you need it to.
One of Gamedec’s biggest gaps is that despite the change in scenery, the characters you’ll talk to, and the narrative at play, each level fundamentally plays exactly like the last. You’ll interact with characters, objects, and clues, putting together what you think is the story, and use additional clues to flesh out what is going on. It certainly does feel like you’re going through the same motions over and over again. Still, there is some comfort in that loop as you never do feel like you’re too lost or hitting a wall on what to do as the game certainly spells out a lot of what your objectives are going to be and that missions can continue to a point where it’s never game over.
While Gamedec takes place across a variety of different games and settings, from Wild West towns to dark Cyberpunk alleys, both in game and out in the title’s real world, it's a shame most locations are small in what you're able to explore in. The one exception being in the real world, which you will visit, but in a limited fashion. Visually, the game is solid with no real blemishes that stand out, though, as I mentioned before, the key art used in conversations is certainly a high point as it's just superb across the board. Characters themselves look fairly well detailed, but as there are no real close-up shots, the far-away camera does certainly make them look better than they likely do up close. Still, Gamedec is a visually solid game that excels at what it is aiming to deliver.
Gamedec, in a lot of ways, plays like a more basic and extremely stripped-down version of Disco Elysium, and that's not exactly a bad thing. The cyberpunk aesthetic works well here, even if some of the game’s environments are limited within the collection of games the title dives into. The art and visuals certainly do a lot of the heavy lifting to a story that is largely forgettable for the most part. For what Gamedec offers, with a variety of choices to how each mission can play out, the replayability is high, depending on if you're taken with its cast of characters and narrative. With a bit of refinement and a better script, this could be a solid franchise if we were to see it continue.
