Gamedec

"I could've been a whistle, could've been a flute
A real life giver, could've been a boot
I could've been a signpost, could've been a clock
As simple as a kettle, steady as a rock"

 

Nick Drake - One of these Things First

 

 

If anything makes my little lupine ears perk up, it's small-time developers promising to revolutionize cRPGs. Every time. No matter how many times I've gotten burned. Gamedec was even pushed hard by GoG, front page and center for months on end last year, but its launch was received tepidly at best in user reviews - and not without cause. Long story short, don't bother.

screw this, let's go pick pumpkins

Where to start?

Visually, less popular genres like isometric RPGs have benefited greatly from increased accessibility of mid-quality graphics in recent years, and Gamedec exemplifies the new standard of "good enough": pretty but not over-reaching, so you're not jazzed but also never feel any lack in their expressivity or immersiveness. Which makes all the more glaring any lack in what is actually expressed or immersed.

 

Storytelling premise:

You are a private detective solving cybercrimes among futuristic skyscrapers where everyone games in full-body suits with neural interfaces. Meaning from chapter to chapter you'll be jumping between your generic cyberpunk world into three "virtualia" (a sanitized S&M fetish world, a Farmville clone and a samurai MMO) which makes for some quaint whiplash moments meeting various players in multiple environments... or would if Gamedec had been written more skillfully, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Gameplay premise:

Mixing genres between adventure and RPGs, you interact with the environment via point-and-click clues (no physics or combat system) but also unlock four kinds of points via dialogue and advancement, invested in character skills unlocking more interactions. A laudable precept, as I've been arguing for years on this very blog for more choice-centered RPGs instead of score farming.

So where's the rub, bub?

1) Awkward, nonsensical, unfinished

"do not translate" - good advice to deduct

If they're demanding $30 for their product, they damn well better proofread it more carefully than I do my random babbling here. Worse, many of your inter[FILE NOT FOUND]actions depend largely on trial-and-error, despite GameDec's "Dec" conceit. For instance you advance through each chapter by gathering clues then selecting from several unlocked "deductions" to move the plot along.... but much of the time you simply have to pick a deduction, any deduction, then run around to every single NPC to check for new dialogue options. Chapter 1's alleyway puzzle gets repeatedly cited as having no particular rhyme or reason to when it unlocks its clutter of clickable clues, but it's far from the only one.

Chapter 4 (the samurai game) deserves special mention though. You're up against a "timer" where certain of your actions count toward a 15-tick limit before you need to appear before the boss NPCs to account for your progress. Sorry, did I say "certain"? I meant uncertain. Many actions add unadvertised ticks to your total (even merely LOOKING at some objects) rewards appear out of nowhere and you're forced to deal with a crafting system adding ticks whenever you try to fumble through a list of recipes... which amounts merely to forcing players to alt-tab to some online guide.

2) Unprofessional professions

 

 

After the opening cinematic, I thought, nice, let's catch and punish some cheaters. I shall be the hand of virtual justice! No rest, no excuses, no mercy, exterminate the filth!

But from the start the "profession" system standing in for RPG stats/skills/feats simply makes no sense. You should gain points by exhibiting your personality (aggressive/intuitive/analytical/empathetic) but professions tend to require points in every category, denying you any personality in favor of farming green points. I picked Self-Direction at character creation, but how exactly does that equate to my only available job being a social butterfly? Sigh... re-roll. In an echo of Torment: Tides of Numenera, Gamedec tries to do away with the old good/evil dichotomy and implement an original morality system... but gave too little thought to its implementation. Basically, all four skill trees (aside from being shallow to begin with) amount to cheating in completely interchangeable ways.

Also, this ostensible detective game underutilizes the analytical approach. The blue tree is about 1/3 green.

In one instance simply looking at the scenery gives you a red point. Was I just staring at clouds that aggressively?!?

Being asked what kind of music you prefer limits you to three choices split between blue or yellow, when music is one of the few topics providing easy justification for ANY answer.

The lack of meaningful choice extends to chapter conclusions as well. Chances are you'll know the right answer at the end of the Farmville quests, but it's too much of a pain trying to finagle dialogues into permitting you to accuse the culprit, and even after a dozen reloads there seems no way to both acknowledge the obvious answer AND side with what the devs decided is the "wrong" NPC... despite talking more sense than the official correct choice.

To top it off... your character advancement doesn't particularly matter, as you can't seem to fail. The extra dialogue options you unlock rarely do more than let you fast-forward past some interactions by cheating.

3) Incompetent writing

So: Gamedec is a facetious, linear, slapdash mess with a shallow, irrelevant skill system. Might it be redeemed by its storytelling?

Despite a decent ending... no, it is not.

Characters speak indistinguishably from each other, relying on the same mix of awkward, incongruous officiousness colored by random colloquialisms.

Dialogue trees, aside from being overstuffed with red herrings, also place many options out of order as in the image above. And no, I'm not particularly worried about spoilers there, since the game's own blurb on GoG openly reveals chapter 2's big plot twist.

One can't accuse the writers of laziness, given the scores of pages of text you can unlock fleshing out the setting, but most of that flavor text suffers from the same monotony and redundance.

Best not even mention the most comically bland fetish sadist murder ever portrayed in any medium. Think Tom&Jerry on a heart bed. On Valium.

One consistent bit of weirdness: who did they think their target audience was? Because I would have assumed a game about gaming is marketed to... gamers. People familiar with games. So why do NPCs feel the need to explain terms like DPS or RNG? ... or NPC? The more I played, the more I was reminded of watching an episode of CSI Cyber: purportedly topical commentary by and for people still seething over a brief brush with modernity decades prior. Even Gamedec's virtualia, boiled down, read like talking points by Jack Thompson: sex&violence, children in peril and heathen cults.

I might hold off on wholeheartedly bashing this embarrassing thirty-dollar mess for the last chapter, which does at least think a step or two past the point you assume it would end, exploring your adventure's multiple possible repercussions.

...

But the fact its grand reveal was painfully obvious FROM THE START OF CHAPTER 2 and even follow-up reveals get telegraphed a chapter in advance, this itself can count as damning praise.

 

4) Pandering

 

Can I trade that box in for some coherent dialogue trees?

Siege of Dragonspear. Deadfire. Wasteland 3. Wrath of the Righteous. Etc.

Etc.

Etc...

In games as in any creative medium across history, incompetence, laziness or profiteering will readily hide behind posturing as champions of a popular cause. (See previous post for a webcomic example.) It does seem though like in the field of cRPGs in particular, the last few years prove that the less confident a game's writers are about their work, the harder they'll lean on Social Justice Warrior crutches to deflect criticism; whether incapable of penning more than two or three endlessly reiterated stock characters as in Deadfire or they've stretched themselves much too thin with a hundred-hour campaign and can't integrate that many characters into their setting coherently, as in WotR.

If you're ever at a loss as to guilt and innocence, right and wrong in Gamedec, just remember the all-purpose FEMale chauvINIST mantra: "man bad, woman good" - always side with women against men.

That's what we call roleplaying now.

Also, gaze enraptured at the magnificence of our homosexuals. Does it not make you want to forget all about those typos and bugs and telegraphed plot twists and tangled dialogues to prostrate yourself before the developers and kiss their feet in praise for their support of homo-righteousness? I keep saying this, but it bears repeating: Fanaticism is, among other things, a refuge for the incompetent.

I also doubt it's any accident that a story ultimately presenting (like so much Caveman Science Fiction) an ultimately luddite warning against the abuses of scary technology, also strains so hard to pander to current narcissistic social fads in overcompensation for its reactionary leanings.

 

Anyway, unless like myself you suffer from some morbid interest in bad RPGs as object lessons, Gamedec's a waste of time and money.