And another “hacking” game that’s compelling enough for me to play all the way to the end, Song of Farca.
It’s more of an adventure game in hacking sim skin. Cyberpunk setting, but Tumblr-esque artwork that’s like Invisible Inc meets of the future fashion of the movie Her.
You’re a private investigator hacker under house arrest. Take cases and follow clues by hacking into the cameras and drones of an area. Fairly simple puzzle solving as you try to maneuver the cameras and drones around. Decent enough writing. There’s one really fun mission where you play the remote hacker support for a merc group on a traditional Shadow Run style raid on a corp HQ, remotely disabling security as they work through the building like so much Neuromancer.
One drawback is a lot of the gameplay involves dialog puzzles where you have to connect 2 facts to draw a conclusion. It suffers from the Phoenix Wright problem where there’s multiple ways to say the same thing, but it only accepts 1 and gets trickier when you’re not even positive what you’re trying to say in the first place (You’re trying to intimidate someone by saying what their ruthless boss will do, but there’s half a dozen facts saying how he’s ruthless).
But yeah it’s in the top ten 2021 games I’ve played so far.
Rather than leave this to die in the comments section for an unrelated post, I figured this deserved its own thread. Hope you don’t mind the friendly dig in the thread title, @Infested_terran!
Does the gameplay get more complex than the prologue? I enjoyed the conversation stuff, even if I didn’t always know what I was supposed to be doing. But the hacking was kind of uninteresting and it wasn’t possible to fail, and that part felt lacking.
Played past the demo stage on this (actually playing on Utomik–that’s a different post) and I like it a lot! Some pretty good patter in the dialogue, though conversations get a little funky when you’re guessing at what information to throw at people. I’ve also been playing the Phoenix Wright games on mobile, and @Infested_terran is right, where the game wants you to show your logic both games break down a little. If that’s how it’s going to be, at least in Farca there’s no penalty bar that forces you to guess a bunch and then reload (or punishes you for not saving).
I think I’m the audience for this sort of thing–no big hurdles, no dead ends (that I’ve seen)–just steady forward progress through some interesting cases. Good chance this’ll end up on my best of the year list.
