Investigate virtual worlds, make deductions, fight crimes
I leap to get to a graveyard, where a player is expecting my first deductions on weird issues plaguing players inside a game called Harvest Time. I get waylaid by the sheriff, who I sweet talk into giving me another job, dealing with an Outlaw. But both of those are in the future.
For now, I plan to spend the next ten minutes working on my virtual farm, trying to get the money for a cow. And then I will get a gun and see whether I can kill the Outlaw and solve all this game’s problems with one well-placed narrative bullet.
And this is one of the less weird video games that my character is exploring, trying to deal with a range of problems that modern gamers might find familiar and some much weirder ones. My detective is unconventional and brusque but he gets the job done and that’s what his clients appreciate.
Gamedec is developed by Anshar Studios and published by Anshar Publishing. I played on the PC using Steam and it is also offered on the Nintendo Switch. This is a text-driven adventure game that creates an intriguing vision of how crime might affect video games in the near future, especially if virtual reality becomes incredibly popular.
The player takes on the role of the gamedec from the title, a detective that specializes in dealing with cases in virtual reality. In this version of the future, a lot of people spend more time and do more important things in VR and, naturally, crime has also moved to this new medium.
There are troll wars, attempts to kidnap avatars and plenty of hacks. And some users are doing in VR stuff that they would be unable to get away with in the real world. The gamedec that players control will need to have solid tech skills in the virtual space and decent social abilities in the real one to solve cases.
