Interrogation: You will be deceived Reviews

If you liked Silicon Dreams, Chicken Police, or LA Noire, you'll probably like this. Interrogation with elements of resource allocation and a decent story about investigating a terrorist organization. Good so far.

This game a was a lot of fun, interrogating to figure out what was going on and getting where you wanted, would certainly recomend it.

! Long Review Warning ! Mild Spoilers? ! I thought this game looked interesting, and as a fan of detective-esque games, I decided to check it out. I played through all the endings and got all the achievements, so I think I'm ready to have a stance. This game is pretty good, but not perfect by any means. Art: Absolutely amazing! I love the use of rotoscoping with the hand-drawn style. The characters show a decent amount of emotion and personality with limited frames of animation. Fits well into the noir style and sets the mood well. Soundtrack: It's pretty alright. Nothing extremely noteworthy, but fits the game appropriately. Gameplay: There's several sections of gameplay. The highlight is the interrogations, though. The game gives you several options and character "builds", so to speak. I preferred to be a pacifist and use wit and persuasion to pit suspects with opposing ideologies against each other. However, the selection of traits for your character allows for good replayability. I did a more violent playthrough to see the other side of things, and I was happy with the differences between runs. There's five actual endings that you get depending on your play style and allegiances, as well as some other endings that act more as game-over states. There's small management sections where you handle your team's motivation, budget, and popularity with several groups. There's even two puzzle sections where you piece together pictures of evidence. This helps to balance the gameplay between the interrogations. Difficulty: This game has multiple difficulty settings. I played Normal on my first run and Challenge on subsequent runs. I'd recommend this to anyone who wants to try the game unless they really want to dive in head-first with the hardest difficulty. For casual players, there's a Visual Novel mode which mostly guides you through the narrative. I didn't play this mode too much, but from what I did experience, I figure you should be able to obtain the endings in that mode as well. My biggest gripe with the game is that it can be really difficult to tell what actions lead to what consequences. This is fine on the initial playthrough, but can be irritating on subsequent playthroughs. I found myself constantly wondering what I said that caused my popularity to shift or my team to lose motivation. There's some in-game assistance you can allocate your budget to, but even if you know that a press release lowered your public popularity, you have no idea why, and it can be really hard to guess. Other than that, the game was a lovely challenge without being frustrating. Story and Characters: The story for the game is fairly interesting. Watching the case my team worked on progress and reach new levels of intensity was very engaging! There were multiple instances that made me continue playing much longer than I should've because I needed to know what would happen next. The characters are fun to examine, too. Your team is who you spend the most time with outside of interrogations, and you can choose to spend time with them to learn more about them. However, the interactions with them are somewhat lackluster. The real fun comes from examining the suspects you interrogate. I found a lot of them very memorable. You get to see their motives, what makes them tick, their backgrounds, their feelings on the world they live in, and more. I think that's what I really loved aside from the detective gameplay. Perhaps this is because I played the game several times, but I felt they were engaging enough to deserve praise regardless. The weak point of the story is the antagonist, plain and simple. I don't want to spoil the game for those who want to play it. Taking the antagonist down is satisfying, but the plans and operations they have make no sense if you think about it too long. It's common sense that the enemy group would've fallen apart immediately had the story not demanded it stay intact simply for the story's sake. That does hurt the impact of the final interrogation, but not enough to make it unsatisfying. The story does change depending on your choices as I stated earlier, and I was happy to see what choices caused what endings to occur. Themes: I felt the narrative never had the "bite" it was going for. A lot of social issues are brought up throughout the game, which led me to think the game was trying to say something. That's what it feels like. However, the commentary feels all over the place, criticizing right-wing, left-wing, and libertarian extremism at the same time. It never dedicates sufficient time to any of these ideologies to say anything meaningful. The biggest message I got from this game was terrorism is bad, which I hope we all know already. I wouldn't be so critical of this if I didn't think it was what the game was going for. It wants to make you ask questions, but doesn't pose any questions worth asking. That doesn't mean the game is bad or that it is uninteresting. It just doesn't handle the issues presented with much nuance. Overall, I recommend any fans of detective-style games and puzzles give this game a try! It's got a good amount of content if you want to see everything, and even if you don't, it's a fun time. I encourage you to experiment and take some of the more wacky traits since that's where a lot of my enjoyment came from after my first playthrough. Nevertheless, try it out! It's pretty good.

The game takes the artistic liberty of being intentionally frustrating. This is compelling as an interrogator because you have to decide what to do when you know who is guilty but can't quite figure out how to get them to confess. The frustration stops being compelling in chapter 8. In chapter 8 they flip the script and force you to suffer through an interrogation led by Internal Affairs where you have to click 32 dialogue boxes in a row exactly right. If you make any mistakes in this sequence, you die after clicking through all 32 dialogue choices and start over. Chapter 8 ruins the compelling aspect of the frustration of this game. It is just tedious and uninteresting.