Gamedec

Gamedec drops you into a near-future Warsaw where the ultra-rich spend their lives plugged into virtual worlds, and you play a private detective called in when things go wrong inside those worlds. There are no fights. No health bar. No sword to fall back on. Your tools are conversation, observation, and the deductions you draw from evidence - and the game tracks every single one of them to shape what kind of detective you become. That premise alone makes it stand out in a genre crowded with games that claim to care about choice but quietly funnel you down the same corridor. The setting does real work. Each virtual world you enter is a distinct genre parody with its own logic: a medieval farming sim hiding labor exploitation, a noir detective sim inside a detective game (yes, really), a hedonist resort where the "fun" turns sinister. Anshar Studios leans into the cyberpunk tradition of using science fiction as a lens on very present anxieties - gig economy precarity, child exploitation, addiction, corporate surveillance. The writing is sharp enough that some of those beats land with genuine discomfort, which is exactly what the genre should do. It is not always elegant prose, and a few side threads trail off without a satisfying payoff, but the core narrative has teeth. The deduction system is the mechanical heart of it. As you gather clues and talk to witnesses, you build up a pool of "aspects" - personality and skill traits that unlock new dialogue options and shape how NPCs react to you. Crucially, you cannot max everything in one run. The aspects you lean on define your detective's personality by the end, which means two playthroughs can feel meaningfully different depending on whether you played a cold rationalist or an empathetic fixer. That is the design promise and, for the most part, it delivers. Where it wobbles is in some deduction gates that feel arbitrary - you can find yourself locked out of an obviously correct conclusion because you happened to prioritize the wrong aspect tree twenty minutes earlier. Annoying, but not game-breaking. The game is also short by RPG standards - six to eight hours for a first run - and some players bounce off that, expecting something closer to a traditional CRPG in scope. Treat it more like an interactive novel with genuine mechanical weight and the length feels right. The lack of combat will also thin the audience: if you need a game loop with tactical encounters to stay engaged, Gamedec is not going to hold you. But if you are the kind of player who spent forty minutes in a single Disco Elysium skill check screen reading every response, you will probably feel at home here. The art direction is confident - the real-world city has a bleak, rain-soaked Eastern European texture that most Western cyberpunk skips entirely, and the virtual worlds pop with deliberate visual contrast. Voice acting is patchy in places, particularly in the English dub, and the UI occasionally buries important information in ways that feel unfinished. These are rough edges on an otherwise thoughtful package. Gamedec is not trying to be the biggest RPG of its year. It is trying to ask uncomfortable questions through the form of a pulp detective story, and more often than not it earns the right to do that.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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