In the 22nd Century, the world has changed drastically. For most people, their true lives are lived inside virtual worlds to just escape the hell that is reality, but when something goes wrong in these online spaces there’s only one person you can call –a Gamedec.
Gamedec is an isometric RPG set in a cyberpunk future. The player begins by creating their own Gamedec — a futuristic detective that involves themselves with crimes that happen inside virtual worlds and bleed out into reality. Game Clan disputes, corporate espionage, and even child slavery are investigations that happen, and the player must solve them.
Inside the short PC preview I played, my character had preset skills, gender, and features. They leaned towards medical abilities, which helped since the first case I had involved a dead body that was seemingly shot down by an automatic turret. My job was to investigate the body and confront numerous NPCs in the area to find out more information. These characters ranged from Outlanders (who seemed like the ‘cops’ of the area), a scientist, and an actress who put her living brain inside a silver robot.
After doing some investigating and exhausting all the NPC dialogue, it turned out that most of the characters had their own theories on what happened to the poor guy ranging from the auto-turret mistaking him for a flying bat, to the victim being gunned down by a gang member. All of this info is are logged inside a logbook for the player to review.
I played through this build a handful of times and got different endings depending on which hypothesis I went with. In one version I called it an accident and life for everyone continued as normal. Another ending saw my character getting shot in the back in front of multiple people. Based on just this small taste, my guess is that the final version will offer quite a spiderweb of possibilities.
Individual NPC reactions seem like they’ll be just as varied. In one playthrough I brought a tough Outlander to the verge of tears, while the next had the same one punching me in the face. NPCs have gauges shown when speaking to them that displays how close a player might be to unlocking more information, or how close they might be to getting locked out of a solution to an objective. It doesn’t seem hard (so far) to choose the correct dialogue for the objective the player’s going for, but sometimes two objectives will contradict each other — choosing one might lock the player out of the other.
I’m looking forward to seeing more of Gamedec and I’m already wondering how different these scenarios will be when I have access to the full suite of skills and abilities to choose from, and the cyberpunk aesthetic is certainly intriguing.
Gamedec currently has a planned release date of September 16, 2021.
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