This is one of those games that I loved the look of the first time I saw it and knew I had to play it. In retrospect, I could take it or leave it. Perhaps, saying that here means that you don’t need to read the rest of this, and you’re right, you probably don’t, but hey, do it anyway, yeah? Please?
Gamedec puts the player in the role of a “Game Detective”, shortened to Gamedec within the game’s lore, a sort of technological wizard entity that enters immersive virtual reality games to solve mysteries. This premise, in my opinion, sounds bloody awesome. Going into video games to solve mysteries? Sign me the fuck up, right now. The first of our cases revolves around trying to free someone from a virtual reality machine that they’re stuck in, which involves us working out which game their in by interviewing someone, going into that game, working out what they look like in the game, tracking them down and then getting them out of it. A not-quite-missing-persons case, right?
And honestly, yes, that’s pretty much what the first case is, only you end up encountering an exploding unicorn, a virus, a whole bunch of trolls, some glitches and blackmail. That’s something the game does – it throws a whole bunch of stuff at your out of left field, in a variety of settings. First off it’s that missing persons case, next thing you know you’re investigating why people are being disconnected from a wild-west farming game, then all of a sudden you’re looking into a cult and the fabric of reality as we know it is unravelling. It escalates, the stakes supposedly raise… and that word there really sums things up. “Supposedly”.
I’m going to level with you here, there are very few points in the game where I really cared about what was happening and to who. There’s a lot of text, not a lot of it was all that interesting to me in the end. I spent about six hours playing during my review run, having spent a bit more time on it a while ago on my PC, but with the PC struggling to run it a bit. I need a new one, really, but who’s got the money for that, eh? Point is, it’s a relatively short game, for the premise, and I feel like it isn’t all that well executed. I won’t spoil the whole situation with the ending, but there are multiple options, none of which are really anything I’d consider a good ending, and they’re all locked behind how you’ve played, with a sort of “well, this is the one you get if you’ve not managed to do this specific thing” option which I ended up with. The whole thing felt quite arbitrary at the time, and arbitrary isn’t really a word you want to describe your detective game with.
Visually, it looks decent enough – I forget what it sounded like, which means it wasn’t offensive to my poor, sensitive, ears. Good sound design, for me, is when you don’t notice it, but in this case, I’m not sure I feel like I can justify calling it good sound design, rather adequate sound design.
At the end of the day, if you want to play a cyberpunk detective game, there’s probably not all that many options open to you so you’ll end up playing this anyway, but you’ll probably find that (like me), you consider the whole experience a wasted opportunity for something truly amazing, and instead, discover that you’ve spent your time doing something fairly mediocre at best.
4/10
Those Guys That Review Stuff 