Eumesmopo
Learned to love the bomb
Everything about the premise of the game sounded great for me when I first learned about it right here on NMA: cRPG with a futuristic sci-fi setting and a strong focus on player choice and narrative branching. It sounded right up my alley and I did start playing it recently.
The setting itself wasn't something I totally enjoyed, the idea of some far future where people spend all of their time on Zuck's Metaverse didn't seem all that appealing to me, but it was (at least at first) self-consistent enough to keep me interested in the gameplay and the narrative nevertheless. The first few impressions I had of the game where actually quite positive, the game is quite competent at setting up the atmosphere and the framing of the story: The year is 2150, you are a virtual detective (a 'gamedec' in the in-universe slang), you live in an apartment in the impoverish region of some dystopic megapolis, you have just waken up and there is a new case on your hands. A solid start.
When your first case begins, that is when Gamedec really begins to shine. You notice right away how the game is reactive to your actions and to your character's skills. As a detective, you are tasked with gathering as many clues as you can before you make a conclusion about what is behind a particular mystery. There are plenty of skillchecks and other interactions with multiple outcomes that might lead you to uncover or not uncover key pieces of evidence. The characters that you interact with themselves also have dispositions towards the player that depend on the choices you make. Good stuff.
As for the story, it's not perfect and it does get a bit silly at times, but it's not bad either. The initial worldbuilding and the atmosphere is solid enough, there is a general tone of intrigue and mystery going on that can get you hooked for the first few chapters. The issues I have with the narrative in the initial sections of the game The real problem is that after that this initial buildup, the writing begins to drop in quality in a very sharp way, by the third chapter I very seriously started questioning the verisimilitude of the events taking place and my suspension of disbelief typed 'GG' into the chat and checked out. The whole thing begins with a crime scene where a full unit of police investigators are repeatedly acting in a extremely incompetent and unprofessional manner down to the point of being unbelievable, even the dialogue gets more poorly written from this point on as one of the investigators that was barring me from entering the scene all of sudden changed her mind, saying: "Oh, you are guy who [mentions some actions I took in the first chapter that are totally unrelated to the case and that she shouldn't even know about], you can come in, I have heard some good things about you." And from there on the story and the writing just keep getting worse and worse to the point of having one of the most pointless and stupid plot twists you could possibly imagine latter on... At some point I really just gave up on the game and stopped playing it altogether because I was getting so frustrated with it.
It was extremely disappointing because for the first two chapters the game did so much right that I was expecting something on par with Shadowrun Dragonfall. The second chapter even ended with you confronting a genuinely morally ambiguous antagonist who was actually making some very good points in his defense, and then they even gave you the option of dealing with him and with the whole situation the way you deemed best. It was like the ending for Disco Elysium if it had actually been done right. Honestly I think that the best way to enjoy this game is to only play the first two cases and pretend the rest of it doesn't exist, since it is such a steep downhill slide in quality that it does a massive disservice to the section of the game that was actually good.
The setting itself wasn't something I totally enjoyed, the idea of some far future where people spend all of their time on Zuck's Metaverse didn't seem all that appealing to me, but it was (at least at first) self-consistent enough to keep me interested in the gameplay and the narrative nevertheless. The first few impressions I had of the game where actually quite positive, the game is quite competent at setting up the atmosphere and the framing of the story: The year is 2150, you are a virtual detective (a 'gamedec' in the in-universe slang), you live in an apartment in the impoverish region of some dystopic megapolis, you have just waken up and there is a new case on your hands. A solid start.
When your first case begins, that is when Gamedec really begins to shine. You notice right away how the game is reactive to your actions and to your character's skills. As a detective, you are tasked with gathering as many clues as you can before you make a conclusion about what is behind a particular mystery. There are plenty of skillchecks and other interactions with multiple outcomes that might lead you to uncover or not uncover key pieces of evidence. The characters that you interact with themselves also have dispositions towards the player that depend on the choices you make. Good stuff.
As for the story, it's not perfect and it does get a bit silly at times, but it's not bad either. The initial worldbuilding and the atmosphere is solid enough, there is a general tone of intrigue and mystery going on that can get you hooked for the first few chapters. The issues I have with the narrative in the initial sections of the game The real problem is that after that this initial buildup, the writing begins to drop in quality in a very sharp way, by the third chapter I very seriously started questioning the verisimilitude of the events taking place and my suspension of disbelief typed 'GG' into the chat and checked out. The whole thing begins with a crime scene where a full unit of police investigators are repeatedly acting in a extremely incompetent and unprofessional manner down to the point of being unbelievable, even the dialogue gets more poorly written from this point on as one of the investigators that was barring me from entering the scene all of sudden changed her mind, saying: "Oh, you are guy who [mentions some actions I took in the first chapter that are totally unrelated to the case and that she shouldn't even know about], you can come in, I have heard some good things about you." And from there on the story and the writing just keep getting worse and worse to the point of having one of the most pointless and stupid plot twists you could possibly imagine latter on... At some point I really just gave up on the game and stopped playing it altogether because I was getting so frustrated with it.
It was extremely disappointing because for the first two chapters the game did so much right that I was expecting something on par with Shadowrun Dragonfall. The second chapter even ended with you confronting a genuinely morally ambiguous antagonist who was actually making some very good points in his defense, and then they even gave you the option of dealing with him and with the whole situation the way you deemed best. It was like the ending for Disco Elysium if it had actually been done right. Honestly I think that the best way to enjoy this game is to only play the first two cases and pretend the rest of it doesn't exist, since it is such a steep downhill slide in quality that it does a massive disservice to the section of the game that was actually good.