Gamedec Review

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Publisher: Anshar Publishing
Developer: Anshar Studios
Platform: PC, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: Sept. 16, 2021
Price: $29.99 USD

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Gamedec is frustrating. It’s always difficult to write a review like this, a game I clearly had some fun with, a game I really want to like, but that I also have to criticize. It’s a cyberpunk noir RPG-adventure game with actual investigation and deduction mechanics. The world is so deep you could spend hours lost in the various codexes and character bios alone. The graphics are a little basic in places, but the world has a genuine aesthetic that it’s a lot of fun to look at and wander through. But every time I find myself charmed by its world, I get stuck in the level and forced to load a save. A decision tree might say one thing but possibly mean another.

In short? This could be a really good game, a solid entry in the genre pioneered by Disco Elysium that’s just starting to take off (see also Murder Mystery Machine and to a more failed extent, The Sunken City) but dear God is it in a rough state.

Sometimes, a car is an effective solution

Gamedec drops you into the trenchcoat of the titular gamedec, a kind of private investigator who handles cases in virtual reality MMOs. As you hunt down cheaters, scammers, cultists, and the odd child labor ring, you make enough to get by and hopefully try to make a little light in the dark world of futuristic Warsaw. But as you investigate, slowly another, more sinister thread emerges— one involving a mysterious tree, twin cultists, and possibly even your own memories and thoughts themselves. It will take all your cunning and instinct to get out of this one, especially in a world where everyone’s wearing a false identity.

So first, the good. Gamedec’s investigation system is unrivaled and I wish more games would do something like it. As you solve sidequests and gather clues, you slowly fill up a group of deductions. At any time, you can use the clues you have to make a conclusion and move on to the next phase of the case, as long as you’ve collected enough evidence for it. This can be a godsend if you’ve gotten tired of a certain scene or movement in the game. It also allows something most games don’t, which is the ability to draw the wrong conclusion and possibly send the case in a different direction.

This ties directly into the branching narrative. Choices you make don’t just last within your current investigation, but can have far-reaching consequences down the line, depending on how you interact with others and what clues you can figure out. Each case has a variety of outcomes, and depending on your skills, background, approach to each situation, and how you interpret the clues, you can get a wildly branching story with a number of start and endpoints based on that. In theory, it’s liberating— a huge (if linear) world where all your choices matter and each playthrough can be completely different based on how you work the case.

Aiding in this, there are a number of “professions” related to skills you can pick up, everything from electronic intrusion to programming to even cheating in games. Each one’s related to different methods of responding, so you can level up your skills based on how you play, as you’ll be earning points from that. It’s incredibly adaptive, and while the skill tree might not be as vast as some adventure/RPGs, it’s a lot more expressive in places, with clear, concise descriptions telling you what everything is supposed to do.

The most essential starting skill. Never leave home without it

But here would be where things start to fall apart a little. While it’s clear how things might help, the actual in-game benefits range from “marginally useful” to “can solve entire stages of the case in one section and then do very little the rest of the game.” It’s not clear how helpful a profession can be until you use it, at which point you might be rather deep into a case. Similarly, while the skill points you earn are based on the personality of your gamedec, apart from a few adjectives and a group of bars on the side, it’s unclear exactly how the points you need to earn relate to each approach. Overall, this just makes it feel obtuse and confusing more than anything.

Adding to that obtuse feeling, sometimes puzzling through the plot feels like stumbling blindly. While it’s to be expected that you won’t see or do everything during one playthrough (and Gamedec makes this very clear as you play), the lack of direction, existence of wrong choices, and the idea that some things can be permanently locked off just make it feel obstructive rather than open-ended. Sure, it’s refreshing to have a game that allows you to miss content and doesn’t hand-hold at all, but Gamedec’s lack of signposting feels downright malicious at times. Especially when compared to the game’s own demo, which walked you through an early case without completely solving everything for you. It’s especially annoying when combined with the difficulty, where sometimes making the wrong deduction and getting the wrong people angry with you can feel like the game hits a dead end.

Gamedec could also benefit from a better quest log. While I understand the need for the player to puzzle through everything on their own, the lack of a detailed log apart from the information on the right-hand side of the screen makes it difficult to know what direction you need to travel in at all. Even the slightest bit of info could help, as it’s difficult to tell what “investigate the anomaly” means apart from wandering around and looking at the street, hoping the right hotspot suddenly reveals itself.

Getting stuck in VR Farmville is a special kind of Hell

Which brings us to the bugs. Even with the fixes and patching done to the initial prerelease build, the game’s in rough shape. While I can’t speak to every player’s experience, I personally ended up getting stuck in place in some areas, clicking frantically in an effort to move around the screen. There were also moments where NPCs reacted to dialogue from later in the scene, or simply closed conversations quickly using dialogue from earlier parts. One scene stopped completely dead, making it impossible to continue. In a rather odd gesture, controller support is automatically enabled when the game detects a controller, and no option in the menu exists to turn it off. It’s upsetting that a game with this much promise is this rough, but it’s also a sad reality that sometimes ambitious projects just need a little more love

So should you play Gamedec? Unequivocally, yes. But not right now. Wait a little longer, let the game get a little more polish, and you’ll be rewarded with an unusual and fun adventure/RPG with a wide degree of replayability. But until it sheds that layer of frustration and smooths out some of the rough edges, you’re going to want to be a little more patient.

The Good
- Deep, branching mystery with unusual characters and a twisting plot
- Excellent character interactions and some truly messed-up noir scenes
- Intriguing mechanics for both character creation and investigation
- Deduction mechanic rewards players for finding evidence and replaying scenes
- Immersive cyberpunk world

The Bad
- Obtuse narrative design means it’s difficult to find out where to go next
- Loads of bugs can make getting through the game painful
- Large range of deductions can make getting the essence of the story a little difficult

Final Score:

Final note: This game was procured as a review code in exchange for an honest review. The review is based on a release build as of 9/11/2021. It may not reflect the final build of the game

World of Horror - A First Look Review

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Game: World of Horror
Developed By: panstasz
Published By: Ysbryd Games
Release Date: 2/20/2020

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World of Horror, recently released on Steam Early Access, is incredibly addictive.

You wouldn’t expect this at first glance. It’s a brutally difficult roguelike, rendered in one or two-bit graphics that make it look and play like someone emulated their favorite Japanese horror RPG from the ‘80s, with all the retro interface and design that entails. It looks, upon opening it up, like a game made for a very specific audience who will “get” it and fiercely defend it. But once you actually start to play the game and make it through the difficulty barrier of those early deaths (and there will be early deaths), it opens up immensely, turning it into a gruesome and tough but incredibly rewarding experience that only deepens the more you play.

Everyone loves puppets, right?

The plot of World of Horror is a fairly simple one. You are a paranormal investigator tasked with solving five mysteries in the seaside city of Shiokawa. Each one of these mysteries, which play out as short horror-adventure games, ties into a larger mystery surrounding a different randomly-chosen elder god. Solve the mystery, and you get a key to the lighthouse where you can finally disrupt the summoning ritual and banish the Elder God back to whence they came. Fail, and you die in one of a number of horrible ways, from being bashed in the head by a baseball bat-wielding stalker to getting infected by a horrifying plague of holes straight out of a Junji Ito story. Depending on how you play, you can unlock a number of achievements that add more “cards” to the story, a set of optional random encounters that add new elements and items to the game.

World of Horror plays out on its impressively detailed screens through a point-and-click interface, hearkening back to classic horror manga and PC games, each screen painstakingly rendered in 1 or 2-bit graphics using black-and-white shading. You select various icons and actions from your various menus, manage your inventory (four items at a time, plus your Item Storage box), and use a variety of spells and items to keep your characters (one of seven, with eight optional backgrounds to spice up your playthrough). Mousing over any icon or option tells you what it does, and while the game expects you to read through all the material you get and take a careful look at your surroundings and the screens they have on offer, it’s a very intuitive system. It does require a lot of reading carefully and figuring out what option does what, but as long as you pay attention to what’s on the screen, especially at the bottom of it and during the (rather frequent) combat sequences. Combat is handled by putting together a sequence of moves based on a time bar, assembling your defensive and offensive actions into a sequence before letting it rip and hoping for the best.

And there’s a lot of “hoping for the best.” The game is random and kind of unforgiving, and while the interface is intuitive, some things you have to figure out as you go. Mysteries, for instance, have multiple endings you can unlock and each run means considering which ones you play in which order— do you go for the grueling battle against a demon from outside space and time first, and then set up the breather at the end? Do you do the mystery where your impending doom (a percentage which serves as a time limit for the game, it reaches full and you lose) will skyrocket and then hope you can get it to go down as you do more mysteries? Do you dare risk the mystery where you’ve died repeatedly and barely ended up solving so you can get it out of the way, or risk coming to it weakened but with higher abilities? But while careful planning will help with a lot of this, sometimes the random events are just downright nasty, adding high percentages to the impending doom meter or ripping your stamina and sanity apart just moments from the end of the scenario. This is especially nasty in combat, where an enemy with a high rating will absolutely wipe the floor with you and shrug off your hits as if they’re nothing, even with the numerous combat buffs you can add.

You, too, will learn to hate Aka Manto

That, if anything, is World of Horror’s one flaw, is its difficulty and random elements. A playthrough can have you quickly screwed over without any way to fix it as the Old God decides to take away your ability to buy items and heal between mysteries quickly, take on too many curses to feasibly complete things, or just end up in combat encounter after combat encounter until eventually you’ve used up your items and the option to run or use your spells will either kill you or advance the doom meter to the point where you won’t win regardless. It’s frustrating sometimes, the way that enemies seem to curbstomp you quickly and the game gleefully shoves you through a gauntlet of terrifying baddies or a bad bounce leaves you scrambling to figure out what to do next. It also presents a cliff that makes it difficult to progress, even the tutorial is one of the most straightforward but grueling levels in the game (“School Scissors, a desperate race to banish the Japanese legend known as the Slit-Mouthed Woman) , pitting you against several tough combats and a terrifying final battle. It’d also be cool if there were more ways to reduce Doom or alleviate Curses, a kind of injury that seems permanent because, as the flavor text says, “modern medicine isn’t useful here.”

But no one said horror manga or cosmic horror stories were happy affairs, and in this at least, it’s accurate. It’s also incredibly satisfying to beat the mysteries and amass yourself a huge variety of allies and weapons, making careful choices and playing smart until you make it to the top of the lighthouse and finally kick over the summoning circle. It allows for both the happiest possible ending and the most depressing, along with everything in between, and that’s actually pretty cool. It also does a great job with generating narrative. The flavor text is a blast to read as you move from location to location, showing the advancement of the mystery as you go, and it’s cool that even turning on the TV in your apartment adds volumes to the story. I’ve played as scalpel-wielding nursing students, occultist transfer students who always seem to end up dead or insane, a swim team captain armed with an interdimensional katana who wiped the floor with an Alexandrian god of fire, and that’s just scratching the surface. Each story feels unique, and as the game’s in early access, I can’t wait to see what they add. Each achievement also adds things to further playthroughs, from new backgrounds that allow for different styles of play (taking more injuries, a lot more cultists coming after you, etc) to new characters, to even more events and abilities. It’s cool to find something you hadn’t before, and there even seems to be a system for unlocking more Elder Gods to fight and a larger bestiary to send against you, deepening each game as you desperately fight against the elder beasts again.

While World of Horror is still in Early Access, what is available is impressive enough that if it keeps up, the full game is going to be a powerhouse. It’s already fully realized, and has enough variety (there’s an entire second “timeline” that shifts the action to Tokyo on top of the other wide range of content) that it’s just as exciting as any other roguelike or horror game on the market. I can’t wait to see what surprises are added to the game, and I hope it’s just as impressive on the full release.

Final score (for now):

The Good:
- Incredibly detailed and gruesome retro-styled graphics and interface
- Wide variety of unlockables and events
- Narrative and theme hang together incredibly well, making for an awesome retro-horror experience
- Addictive gameplay with a lot of hidden depth

The Bad:
- It’s got a difficulty cliff more than a difficulty curve
- Combat can get frustratingly difficult at times
- RNG hates you, but not always in a fun way

Fast, Furious, Fun: Dead End Job Review

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Release Date: 12/13/2019
Publisher: Headup Games
Developer: Ant Workshop, LTD
Platform: PC
Price: $16.99

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Sometimes you just need something quick to play. Something addictive and engrossing enough that you can get deep into it, but just light enough that you can disengage if need be. Something that can be played a little casually, but has a lot of depth and action. And directly in that sweet spot is Dead End Job. It’s a roguelike shooter with a ton of style, a good sense of humor, and easy enough controls to learn. But between the variety of enemies, the arcade-style combat, and the large number of perks and items strewn across its levels, it’s far from a basic experience. It’s something fantastic for if you want to get lost for a little while busting ghosts, or if you just need something for a quick burst of gaming.

Dead End Job puts you in the vast overalls of Hector Plasm, a slovenly-looking blue-collar ghostbuster. Hector works for Ghoul-B-Gone, a shady ghost-hunting outfit run out of a small fly-by-night office. When Hector’s partner chokes on a sandwich, he has to save up enough money and complete enough work on a portal to the other side to bring her back from the dead, as outlined in the cheery ‘90s cartoon-style theme song that opens the game. To do this, you go to various locations throughout the city to bust ghosts, shooting them until they’re stunned and then vacuuming them up in your pack. Each ghost you bust is added to your score, represented as an invoice in the corner of the screen. As you try to reach your goal by completing at least one job a “day,” new areas are unlocked at each milestone, allowing you to bust more challenging ghosts and more complicated areas.

There’s a great unified aesthetic to Dead End Job. The dev team set out to make it look as much like a ‘90s Nickelodeon cartoon as possible, and between the loose, gross-out designs and the bold color pallette, it succeeds. Each new level even has its own episode title and credits, popping up as a loading screen as Hector drives his broken-down van to the job site. This is continued in the various stages, all of which have a different theme to them (office buildings, parks, restaurants) with their own variety of ghosts to bust. Even the bosses maintain the theme, with you fighting ghosts possessing sandpits, ghostly babysitters, and huge ice cream cones in the middle of a haunted park. The park’s level design is especially good, with the stage making use of the wide-open spaces and long ranges for some absolutely wild firefights with the destructible scenery adding a nice added dose of mayhem.

And then you add the perks and items. Suddenly what was a simple arcade-style shooter turns into a wild, cartoonish explosion, with things like scenery spontaneously exploding in wads of cash upon clearing a room of ghosts, “coolant holes” that allow your gun/vacuum to fire for longer, or even saving you from losing all your perks upon death. Also aiding you in your quest of ethereal extermination are a variety of throwables, edibles, and extra guns that further clear a room. All of these combine in a variety of interesting ways, allowing you to zip around a level and fill up on ghosts in no time at all.

But there are difficulties, even with such a simple premise. For one thing, movement is incredibly slippery, meaning that you can easily lose control of Hector, even as the game keeps its fast pace. Hector can also tend to get stuck on scenery in places, which in the heat of battle when you have almost bullet hell levels of projectiles coming at you, gets more than a little annoying. While these don’t happen often, it’s enough that when you’re cornered by three enemies, stuck on the corner of a table, and somehow the enemies aren’t similarly impeded. There were also times when my computer forced a quit of the program mid-level only for the game to count it as a loss and start me from zero, and it was really annoying when that happened, even though I get that it discourages rage-quitting. It can also get repetitive in much longer stretches, though this does make it perfect for short to medium bursts instead of sitting down for the long haul. The aesthetic can also be kind of gross, with Hector pelvic-thrusting in the air after every mission, the animation a little too good at showing his movements.

In the end, though, Dead End Job is everything it needs to be— a quick, fast-paced arcade shooter with just enough depth and storyline to keep the player hooked, but nothing that leaves you bogged down or stuck in a grind. It’s fun, with its shabby fly-by-night operation offering a great aesthetic, the unified design of the various stages, and the high score tying into the overall storyline of you trying to raise money so your partner comes back. And that’s not even getting into the co-op, which adds a new dimension to the game and supports local play. It’s addictive, simple, and has a lot of interesting depth and play choices, even if the structure serves short bursts and quick sessions more than longer play. It’s fast, furious, fun, and that’s really all it needs to be.

The Good
- Fast-paced action
- Perfect ‘90s cartoon aesthetic similar to Ren And Stimpy or Klasky-Csupo
- Great level design and some frenetic firefights

The Bad
- Slippery controls, getting stuck on scenery is annoying
- Can get a little repetitive at times