Has anyone else played Gnosia? It seems I got pretty hooked on this lately…
It’s a social deduction game like Werewolf or Among Us, but single player, wrapped in a sci-fi/horror visual novel style presentation, with some RPG trappings and rogue-lite meta progression.
The game involves repeating ‘loops’ where you’re trying to deduce the identity of the aliens who’ve taken the place of the crew. At the end of each ‘day’ someone gets voted into stasis. That night, if there are aliens still remaining then someone will disappear.
To determine who gets iced, you play 5 rounds of an argument game, where everyone is accusing, denying, and supporting each other, after which there is a vote.
You have a bunch of stats that tie in to how well you can influence others or avoid being targetted yourself, like Charisma, Intuition, Performance, Stealth, etc. These stats are a meta component that you level up and are persistent through the multiple loops.
All the other characters have various (fixed) levels in these stats too, which influence how they act and give them their distinct personalities.
It progresses in a really engaging fashion, starting off simple with only a couple of characters and roles (‘Crew’ and ‘Gnosis’, which is the name for the alien).
As you play through more loops you reveal more roles that make logical deduction way more puzzling, such as Engineer who every night can examine one person to determine if they are Human or Gnosis. But Gnosis can lie and also claim to be the Engineer… Throughout the game you will play all the roles yourself too, including Gnosis.
New characters are revealed. Each character also has a bunch of pertinent conditional information that gradually gets unlocked.
The actual argument game itself gets pretty repetitive as a lot of the response dialogue quickly repeats, but you don’t really care as the act of playing is pretty entertaining and you really want to find out more about the world and the people.
Big thumbs up!