In the future gaming, especially online gaming has become so ubiquitous to human existence, that most people spend almost all of their time in the virtual worlds called Virtualiums. It's not all peachy living, as the crime happens on virtual realms as well, so that has sprung up a new profession of Gamdecs, detectives specialized in solving crimes in the Virtualiums. You are one such virtual detective, not quite a police, but a private investigator hired by people who have issues in the virtual world.
The very first case you embark upon shows what the stakes are. A rich man calls you in to get his son out from a virtual world. He's stuck in an unknown location, trapped in the virtual world by a hacker. Like a proper detective, you need to check out the real-world surroundings first, question people and see if there are any clues around that could help you pinpoint the virtual world the victim is trapped in. Depending on your skills, you can choose different methods of finding the clues, but after all, is said and done, you should have the location and can finally enter the virtual realm to see what it all is about.
I'm hesitant of calling Gamedec an RPG game. It's not quite that, as does lack a couple of RPG stables. First, there are no character stats, like strength or intelligence. There's no experience system and no character progression on similar terms as there's in a standard RPG. What Gamedec has is profession trees, which will give you speciality in coding, medicine, influence and hacking. You progress in these trees in any fashion you want, not locked on any specific branch, with points you gain by solving puzzles, talking to people and in general doing stuff in specific ways.
Second, Gamedec lacks combat altogether. In any given RPG, combat is usually the main source of character progression, but here, there's none. Building up the profession tree is all about talking to people and solving puzzles, there's no filler combat. There's just you trying to solve the cases. Each case you tackle has deduction paths, which you can progress by gathering enough information which will help you to arrive at a conclusion that may or may not be wrong. Even the wrong conclusion can take you forward and it's quite usual to be forced into a situation, where you just have to make a conclusion that might be completely wrong just to progress the game as you might have angered the people or missed an important clue.
At its core, Gamedec belongs to the group of adventure/RPG hybrids. It's not fully either but does try to dabble and gather the best elements from both in what comes to multi-branching narratives. That really is the keyword here, multi-branching narrative. The whole game revolves around the branching story and in how you see fit in tackling it, in what kind of a personality you want to play as.
Perhaps the nicest thing about Gamedec is, that as it is game based in the world of games, it's not locked in a world with a single visual appearance. I'm saying it fully utilizes this in its different gaming world ranging from sleazy sex games to wild west farming games, but it does provide some visuals not generally seen on cyberpunk games.
Gamedec does quite a bit right in the genre it presents. It has dared to throw away any superficial things it doesn't need, like character stats in order to streamline the RPG elements it needs to provide the type of gameplay it is after. It doesn't expect you to hit the jackpot each time you delve into a new case and it allows quite a bit of leeway for different builds to flourish. It is a wordy game, not as wordy as something like Torment which managed to be a bit tedious at its worst, but still heavily reliant on the written story. That also means you have to enjoy the writing in order to like the game, as if you don't, there's nothing much to enjoy. There's no other style of gameplay to compensate for poor writing.
The writing is, on bigger terms, decent. There's nothing that'll blow your mind in any of the stories or in the bigger narrative, but it does carry to the end. It has to be stated, that the ending itself is something of a disappointment. There are multiple endings, depending on your choices, but in this case, the ending summary that goes through your choices during the game itself, is just that, a summary without any further elaboration on if any of it actually mattered. The ending itself is chosen from 6 different possibilities given to you, of which some can be disabled based on your gameplay choices, like if you killed someone or so on. It's definitely a weak way to end a game such as Gemdec and comes out a bit rushed.
If you are into narrative-driven adventure/RPG's, Gamedec is fun enough of a game. It does have its flaws, but it is, overall, strong enough of a game to warrant at least a glance. The idea of being a Gamedec is entertaining enough, even if the idea of different virtualiums isn't executed in its fullest capacity. It odes provide an interesting enough of a starting point though for a future interpolation in a sequel or perhaps even in the form of DLCs to add more intrigue to the game.
Gamedec can be bought from GOG and Steam among other stores. It'll come out for Nintendo Switch at some point as well.
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