Gamedec

As it says in the blog description, I’m just a guy who likes mysteries, games, and mystery games. So you’d think Gamedec, a mystery game about mysteries in games, would be right up my alley, but there are just too many rough edges for me to recommend it. I wish I could, and the pieces are there, but they just clash with each other in a way that prevents the game from coming together as a cohesive whole.

Gamedec is a sci-fi visual novel that takes place in a cyberpunk corporate dystopia with fully-immersive virtual reality games known as virtualia. You play as a gamedec—“game detective”—which is a PI that investigates cases involving or occurring in virtualia. For instance, in the first case you are hired by an executive of a big company to help his son, who is apparently trapped in a virtualia. You need to figure out which game he’s playing, then enter it, find him, and figure out why he can’t log out.

The issue with Gamedec is that the mechanics and narrative are completely at odds with each other. The mechanics suggest a narrative RPG where you need to crack the case and choices matter, while the actual plot is transparently linear. The game asks me to painstakingly make a character sheet, then immediately uses it to blow its nose and throws it in the trash. Gamedec would’ve felt much better if the plot was able to actually present substantive choices or if the gameplay mechanics at least didn’t imply it would.

The game takes place from an isometric viewpoint where you can walk around, talk to people, and examine items. There are two main mechanics through which you make choices and develop your characters.

First is aspects and professions. Certain choices you make will get you a point in one of four personality “aspects,” green (empathy), red (passion), blue (logic), or yellow (positivity). Professions, which unlock conversation options, are laid out in a (skill) tree, with each node requiring you to spend points in your aspects to unlock.

The second mechanic is deductions. Each case is usually split into 3 to 4 stages, and each stage has 1 to 3 deductions, each of which is displayed as a node on the deductions screen. For each node, the game displays all pertinent clues you’ve found on the left side, and then 2 to 4 possible conclusions (which you often need sufficient data to discover) on the right. All you need to do is pick a conclusion, but the choice is yours.

There are a few problems with these mechanics. The fact that professions are flavored as professions feels incredibly odd. At the start of the game you’ll just have one reasonable-sounding job, but by the end of the game you can be a super-programmer pop star neuroscientist, or miracle healer mob boss police enforcer, or football-playing king in space. (Okay, maybe not the last one.) It feels odd how you can be standing there, pop open a menu, and three seconds later (apparently) have an entire new career layered on top of all your previous ones. Plus, professions don’t do anything other than unlock conversation choices, meaning you never actually display any indication of any of these professions. Even if your profession screen shows that you’re a doctor-artist-athlete, your character still only does game-detective work.

With deductions, I think the issue is more in implementation than the mechanics themselves. Presenting all relevant clues and all possible deductions on one screen is actually great! The issue is that the deductions don’t matter. No matter what you pick, the story will progress in largely the same way. (Sometimes you’ll be choose between one route or another, but the diversion will only ever last one segment.) It doesn’t matter if you’re right or wrong, nothing changes. A lot of times the game won’t even give you the correct answer as a choice. (To the game’s credit, there will then usually be a “None of these,” “I don’t know,” or “Something else” option so you aren’t forced into choosing something incorrect, but it feels pretty silly for the game to give you a mystery and then not let you solve it.)

The mechanics want a game where you’re forced to think critically to make decisions that shape the narrative, while the narrative is a kinetic novel. We’re left with a dissonance that forces us to make a bunch of pointless decisions, which detracting from the experience.

I am reminded somewhat of The Sinking City, which also required you to make choices that ultimately didn’t affect the game. While it wasn’t ideal in The Sinking City, I think it was handled much better there. In Gamedec, the game prompts you as if you’re solving the case, but it’s really just leading you down the same corridor regardless of what you do; the quintessential illusion of choice. In The Sinking City, however, each case follows a linear path to the solution, and then once you arrive there you must make a choice on how to resolve the case. In other words, Gamedec places the choices in the journey, while The Sinking City places them at the destination. In the latter you make a moral decision, and that moral decision reflects and reinforces the themes of the game. In Gamedec, you’re supposed to be solving crimes, and it’s the (lack of) choice that in fact eats away from that objective.

By the way, none of the professions are necessary to complete the game, which I think is emblematic of the broader issue: a full suite of choices to customize as you like, none of which actually matter.

Perhaps I could forgive Gamedec if its narrative was great, but it’s not. It’s not bad, but it’s not particularly interesting either. I think a large part of the reason that it’s underwhelming is that Gamedec throws you into the deep end of its without enough (or really any) context. Gamedec’s world is extremely different from our own, with completely different terminology, societal systems, and morals. It’s difficult to parse what’s mysterious when we don’t understand what’s normal. A large part of the game is navigating conversation trees, but conversation is a lot harder when you don’t have the same cultural background and understanding as the other person. (Which could be cool in a game if it was intentional, but here it is not.)

The game covers a series of cases which will take you through a few different game worlds, and it’s fun seeing the variety, but generally they aren’t particularly noteworthy. Something odd is happening in a game, you find out who is causing the bugginess, the end. The game does ramp up at the end, which is pretty fun until you realize it’s kind of the most basic place to take the story, and a large component of one of the most famous sci-fi stories of all time. I think the game would’ve been much better served coming up with puzzle plots that took advantage of the deduction mechanic than a noir story.

The ending, like the rest of the story, was also underwhelming. There are six endings, and the way it works is that each ending has certain requirements, and when you reach the end you can choose from any of the endings whose requirements you’ve satisfied. The main thing that irked me about these endings is that the entire finale sequence seemed to be ramping towards one resolution… and then all endings of that type were locked out to me because I wasn’t enough of a jerk. Each ending is just a short cutscene, so, like all the other choices in the game, it doesn’t feel particularly impactful. It also feels a bit odd being told that this ending exists, but I can’t see it, although I’m not sure just hiding all endings you didn’t unlock (which is basically how Call of Cthulhu did it) is the answer.

There is also a standalone (free) DLC case, which is full of references to... another game... that I had assumed was by the same developers, but doesn’t appear to be. (Well, they’re both Polish, at least.) But either way, this case is probably the best part of the experience. As a standalone case the scope of the story is much more limited than the main campaign, but that limited scope allows it to be more focused and thus effective at what it sets out to do.

Gamedec is an indie game, so naturally there is some jankiness. For instance, whenever you’re in a list, the first time you press down you’ll jump from the first entry to the third, rather than the second. (After that, arrow keeps work normally.) But nothing game-breaking. The game is Polish, and the writing and translation is functional but nothing stellar. Graphics are fine, with everything rendered in 3D, but the isometric viewpoint means we often can’t see the details.

Considering “Gamedec” is short of “game detective,” it seems like it should’ve been the perfect game for me, but it was just underwhelming. Gamedec presented an interesting world, but the narrative structure and game mechanics were diametrically opposed to each other, with neither element near exceptional enough to make up for the other or the dissonance. If you want a linear dystopian sci-fi visual novel, feel free to check out Gamedec, but steer clear if you’re interested in deductive games. I don’t regret supporting the effort here, but I do wish the result ended up better.