I love a good narrative mystery experience. Even more than that, I love stories that allow me to really understand characters and their motivations. Gamedec is a narrative adventure-style RPG experience that will immerse you in a cyberpunk world…if you can get it to stop bugging out long enough.

Anshar Studios’ Gamedec is a lot like Disco Elysium in principle. There is no combat to speak of and the choices you make, along with your main character’s personality, determine the “stats” you can achieve. There are 4 personality types, represented by red, blue, green, and yellow. By selecting dialogue options representing these types, you can get points in them.

These points can be invested in professions, which give you experience in various fields and allow you to choose unique dialogue options. Your character is a Gamedec, a sort of “Private Detective via The Matrix” type of figure who solves cases that involve virtual worlds. To use an example separate from the game’s narrative, perhaps you had a friend who was playing an online virtual reality game and then went missing. It would be up to the Gamedec to follow virtual bread crumbs to see what happened.

Each case alternates between time in the real world, known as realium, and a virtual world built around a game. Most of the games are recognizable parodies of other things, such as a cute Harvest Moon-esque game. However, it should be made clear that this is a game for adults, as there is a lot of adult content involved. Things like sex work, exploitation of workers, and all sorts of mature topics show up in the game.

However, there is a lot of choice and replay value involved, so your case results might change depending on what information you uncover. The problem is, that there are certain elements that will soft-lock the game if you don’t uncover them in the correct order. This was an issue I ran into during the game’s first case and had to restart it to play through it again.

The second case was just as buggy, as I restarted it twice. Not because I soft-locked the game, but because somehow my character would get stuck in a specific spot (that I had to walk past) and wouldn’t move. Saving the game and reloading didn’t work but reloading the autosave took me back to the beginning of the chapter.

If you make a mistake, I could see the autosave at the beginning of the chapter being helpful. However, it was disheartening to have a bug cause me to have to reset not once, but twice in that second chapter, when I’d already restarted the first chapter once due to a soft lock.

The problem is, when Gamedec isn’t bugging out, I really like it. The characters are interesting, and the world is very similar to choose-your-own-adventure style cyberpunk stories where you shape the direction your case ultimately leads. While the stories are connected, they largely (at least at first) play out like an anthology, so you can really immerse yourself in each new virtual world and cast of characters.

With the bugs as prevalent as they are though, I can’t help but hope that the developers give the Switch port of Gamedec some TLC. I don’t know if the PC version has these same issues of quests and characters bugging out, but I really hope not. If you find yourself intrigued by Gamedec, pick it up on sale. I’d feel better about recommending it at a lower price.

As many times as I ran into these issues, I’m amazed Anshar Studios didn’t run into any during QA testing. Regardless, the bugs turned an exciting, enthralling Cyberpunk experience into something that left a sour taste in my mouth.

A Nintendo Switch review copy of Gamedec was provided by Anshar Studios for this review.

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Gamedec

$29.99 USD

4

Score

4.0/10

Pros

• Great Stories and Cases
• Interesting Characters
• Lots of Replay Value

Cons

• Buggy Character Dialogue and Quests
• Character Can Get Stuck
• Can Accidentally Soft-lock Certain Quests