Decade

The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip. The body count climbs through a series of globewars. Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases. Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace. By the time soft-engineering slithers out of its box into yours, human security is lurching into crisis. Cloning, lateral genodata transfer, transversal replication, and cyberotics, flood in amongst a relapse onto bacterial sex. Neo-China arrives from the future. Hypersynthetic drugs click into digital voodoo. Retro-disease. Nanospasm.

This game takes the old school idea of a "text game" and flips it on it's head. You can really dive deep into this one if you want to for well over 10 hours of gameplay. The art package is truly amazing. Looks stunning the whole way through, including the psychodelic FMV endings. Looking forward to anything else from this developer!

Warning for a lengthy comment below… 1. I was initially attracted by the intro video - precisely speaking, the minimalistic and resonant music of the video. Then, when I watched the FMV of my first ending - that’s the default ‘rain’ ending- I knew that I just paid for the right game :) And when I (almost) explored the whole story, I considered this game a kind of bible for an amateur indie game developer like me. 2. “Decade” is not only a game for a quick emotional surge but also a medium that inspires people to think and feel. It’s basically a game of management, but the ‘units’ are kids and the ‘resource’ is their entire life - the setting is unusual and has a strongly emotional impact. It’s also an adventure game in that the players are exploring a great diversity of thoughts. The part of the game is more ‘rational’ and the players need to read… What is so successful here is that the developer did not make it into “Greek Philosophy 101”. Instead, the reading itself is also emotional because most of these ‘thoughts’ eventually led to doom. 3. I can see that many players praised the game for its art. The art is unique, of course. The best part is that (in my opinion) the developer tried to dissociate them from the real world. Interestingly, the detachment between the game and the real world makes things more believable. It would be ridiculous if the kids brought me a picture that ‘Hollywood is destroyed’ (as seen in those blockbuster films…). The visual materials are detached from our real world — strangely, it makes the whole story more believable (yes, there are Bergamists or Vetiverists within us in this world, perhaps with stranger names) 4. Some players criticized the game for the weaker link between the things/materials they did and the effect caused. I partly agree with them, and it’s actually how I started to play this game: I analyzed all the things people brought in and configured all the combinations of Who X What X How… and I felt exhausted to ‘solve’ it. As a lover of point-and-click adventure game, I would say that ‘Decade’ is not a puzzle-solving game. The point is not to find the best strategy to beat something. It’s a game about how people interact with each other, rather than how to solve a puzzle efficiently. 5. Each run of this game, good or bad, makes me satisfied! "The sky shall open and I shall drink my fill.” Lady Deirdre Skye

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Incredibly unique and interesting game, loved my time with it. Check it out if you enjoy science fiction and/or philosophy and great storytelling!

I'd like to start by saying this is a rough gem, but a gem nonetheless. If you have any interest in dystopias or alternate history settings, and you enjoy narrative heavy games, then give this a try, right now! You may not agree with the themes or message of each dystopia, and you may have problems with aspects of the game's general historiography (if certain other reviews are any indication), but what's interesting about someone who thinks exactly like you do? Now for some complaining: Firstly, this is not a Choose Your Own Adventure where you'll spend hours debating philosophy with the characters or that has thousands of choices with bespoke outcomes. This is a puzzle game. The narrative hints and feedback you receive are certainly much better than the point-and-click or puzzle games of decades (lol) past, but still too thin and vague for my own taste and I think the taste of general audiences. Worse is that many puzzles require you to get three separate elements correct and does not give you different feedback than if you had gotten them completely wrong, even if you were close. In one instance, I selected the correct trigger and the correct action, and was very frustrated to find out when reading the walkthrough later that I would've never experienced 2/3's of the story if I hadn't looked up a guide, simply because I didn't select the correct item. Unfortunately, I believe this story may have worked better in a novel format, if the puzzle elements had been removed completely, or if the resource pressure of the children's ever-increasing ages was removed or at least halved. As it is, it simply does not feel very good to send your kids back in time and waste 10 years of their life having learned nothing new, despite your most educated guess. This is surely part of the intended experience, but you're ALSO expected to restart multiple times to get all the different endings. This is only made more tedious by that fact that your discovered timelines only stay on-screen until you change saves or restart, and there is no indication that you've explored all the valid branches of a timeline! You're expected to care about your kids, and I did at first, but you start to view them as tools after the fifth restart. This feels like a really bad design clash and makes for an unpleasant gameplay loop. There is an argument that this could also be intentional (full spoilers ahead!), [spoiler] mimicking your character's personal development. I don't think that makes sense. Firstly, and most importantly, it's very clear when you restart that you are doing it as the player and not the character. However, multiple dialogues with the children about your behavior before reaching the bunker imply, and the contrast between the "Good Ending" and "Best Ending" basically confirm that your character was basically a Vetverist-lite all along. Or, at least, someone who wanted a life of death and violence for themselves, even if they maybe wanted a better future for humanity and recognized that particular dystopia as not being objectively better than most of the rest outside of personal preference. It is possible the protag really was a cold-blooded sociopath doing it all for himself, as some of Ula's dialogue and timeline imply. Even after you get the archival fluid you can't choose to follow Jag's suggestion to find a nice timeline and jump into it together, or start using yourself in the experiments. Still, I take the more optimistic interpretation I began with. [/spoiler] That being said, I think my argument stands. Also, and this is a pretty minor complaint given this is a project from an indie solo dev (as opposed to the puzzle/gameplay issues which were a design choice that added MORE work for the dev), but I found the UI to be pretty visually unappealing and lacking in feedback. It definitely felt a little sluggish too, though that may just be my machine. However, the choice of multiple themes based on ideologies you've discovered was a nice touch. I also REALLY enjoyed the FMVs! Despite complaints making up the vast majority of this review I'd like to say I still really loved this game's and only wrote all this out because I was distraught to see only about 5% of players have finished the game! My suggestion: play the game as intended until you start to get frustrated and then use the dev's guide and flowchart to experience the rest of the story. Really excited to see what Last Piscean comes up with next! And please, throw this developer some cash before a youtuber makes a two-hour video essay summarizing every single plot point and sucking up further sales.