Gamedec

It’s a shame there isn’t more opportunity to explore the world at large, but Gamedec is a rewarding and immersive role-playing adventure that offers a satisfying amount of player agency in the direction of this cyberpunk detective mystery.

Gamedec is ambitious and fun for the adventure game fan who is willing to put up with some issues. I like the variety of the cases and the way the main character has options when it comes to dealing with NPCs. I enjoyed the mysteries, despite the sometimes convoluted way that leads to an answer. The future it envisions is also a pretty plausible and weird one. I wanted the developer to have the resources to deliver the amount and quality of writing to match their ambitious universe. But for players looking for a smart cyberpunk narrative and willing to overlook some problems, Gamedec is a good way to spend 10 or so hours.

Pretty much all the pieces for a good detective game are there, but Gamedec fails for a variety of reasons. Apart from an unhelpful, tutorial-esque chapter that confuses more than it helps, and a UI that makes simple things harder, the writing is extremely boring, ruining the incentive to keep on sleuthing, as it is hard to care about anything, or even remember what is actually going on. Bad writing isn't just a small thing here, either, with almost 90% of the experience revolving around reading text.