Ancient Citiesīy drawing observations and responding in kind, the game rewards us by distributing points in the four traits that define the personality of our alter ego.

We talk a lot, because dialogue is our investigator’s weapon, inside and outside of digital sprawl. The isometric view and the cyberpunk setting might initially suggest a game similar to the latest and lucky incarnation of Shadowrun, but the truth is quite different: in Gamedec you don’t go around cautiously brandishing futuristic weapons in the hope that bionic grafts and a good bodice Kevlar may offer protection from stray bullets, but we talk about it. The result of the umpteenth crowdfunding campaign, the game is inspired by the universe created by the Polish author Marcin Przybytek and puts us in the shoes of a Gamedec, or a private investigator from Warsaw City committed to finding the rotten that lurks inside and outside the so-called Virtualia, or the IT frontiers where millions of people flock to forget, even for a moment, the horrors of the world. Inside these fortresses, however, the danger is not represented by a group of grotesque judges coming from a dimension where living is a crime, but by the modest and necessary need for escapism a bit like in the universe imagined by Ernest Cline in Ready Player One (and with this – I swear – we’re done with the quotes!) the only outlet for a collapsing civilization is idealized in virtual reality, a digital universe where the corrupt have found a new gold mine. We are at the end of the twenty-second century, and the human race is looking worse than expected in the introduction of Ken the Warrior! The planet is in ruins and the ecosystem has turned into a hostile creature, so much so that in order to survive man has been forced to confine himself to giant cities, in a way not unlike Judge Dredd’s Mega- Cities.

Gamedec for windows download