The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker (2017)

I fall in lockstep with other reviewers on this one: it's a creepy, well-written concept that is completely undermined by gameplay weaknesses. I imagine that programming the game for more nuance in response to questions would have been an enormous undertaking, but the precision required to communicate with the game was pretty frustrating.

That said, I really admired the ambiguity of the setting and characters, and how the game kept me guessing about the nature of reality and sanity. But (you knew it was coming), I think there were some missed opportunities to sharpen up the tension by addressing a couple of elephants in the room. For example, the player is both the therapist to the characters and the one investigating the murder of their predecessor. That kind of dual relationship is something I could accept in fiction, but I think the game lost some interesting opportunities to explore that, what it means for patient trust, and how that duality impacted the sanity (or lack thereof) of the protagonist and who they work with. Can you help someone get better while also determining if they're guilty of a crime? And when you're the one simultaneously responsible for determining if they're sane or not? I wouldn't expect (or want) the game to answer that definitively, but I think it loses something by not even asking.

Anyway, Madness is an interesting game. I doubt I will pick up the sequel, but it was worth the time I spent to experience this one. 3 out of my customary 4.

I'm sure there's a cool story in here. Unfortunately the game's free text input mechanic is unbearably boring and clunky. The characters seem to respond to keywords, ignoring any context in your input. Their answers are usually nonsensical with respect to what you've actually asked and constantly reveal that there's nothing more going on under the hood than a look-up in some sort of internal database based on one word in the sentence you've typed. It makes it really hard to feel any immersion. I constantly felt like I would probably have a better experience if I just typed in the keywords I suspected would matter, but then the whole 'this is a conversation' shtick falls apart and the game just feels like a massive chore.

I understand the technical difficulties of making a game with realistic dialogue based on freeform user input (in 2018 no less). Especially when the responses are entire clips made with real actors and such. It's cool that the developers wanted to experiment with this type of gameplay, but the end result is just not good enough to be entertaining in my opinion.

An interesting FMV with a suitably creepy story. The actors are all very good and I liked the set up - you play a psychiatrist trying to find the murderer of your predecessor.

The problem is with the gameplay: you type questions in and the patients answer, but this means that a lot of the time you are struggling to be understood. The parser simply responds to keywords in the questions. For example, asking a question about someone's mother gets a canned "I don't understand that" response because you need to ask about her parents instead. And there are many times were the answer was clearly to a different question than the one I asked.

I got more and more tired of this over the game and I just switched to using a walkthrough to get through the final chapter.

I think I would have enjoyed this if the format had been different - select questions from a list for example - but as it is I can't recommend it.

This is a fun little Lovecraftian FMV game where you replace a recently murdered psychiatrist and try to suss out which of his patients killed him, all while treating them and also trying to figure out if their strange claims are real or not and whether or not you're insane. One claims he has an extra hour every night where he's free to act but everyone else is frozen in time. One claims to relive the same day over and over ala groundhog's day. One says she can change her form into a loved one by touching you, and uses it to comfort her dying patients in hospice care.

Actually "playing" it is a bit of a nightmare, however. You're presented with a list of patients each day. Each patient has a series of prefab questions you simply click on to see the actor's recorded answer. After you run out of those you're faced with a text box in which you can type anything you want, and will have to use this to get everything a patient has to offer that day (there's an indicator to let you know you've gotten everything). The questions you're expected to ask are often incredibly specific, and the text parsing engine isn't great. Often I'd type a question, get nothing, type "hint" and be presented with a hint to ask the question I just asked, just phrased a different way. Many of the questions you're expected to ask I would literally never ask, because I already knew the answer, or the answer seemed self-evident, and upon going through the motions and doing it anyway because the hint told me to, the actor would have a five second clip where they said the obvious thing I already knew. What is the point of these?

So, you'll be typing "hint" into the text box a lot to get through this game. Unfortunately it has a cool-down timer, and while it can be lowered in the settings (to 30 seconds) it can't be removed entirely. And since a lot of the answers are five second long restatements of the obvious, expect to spend a lot of 20-25 second chunks of time with absolutely nothing you can do to advance. Absolutely infuriating.

[There might be minor spoilers in the following, but I am mostly trying to stay vague. I would also like to say, this is kind of a half-review. The game kinda left me feeling wishy-washy on a lot of points, so if I tried to do a full review, it'd probably be even more ridiculously long while I vacillated between liking things, and hating others, and liking and hating some mechanics at the same time.]

So I played The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker and it's one of those games that makes me wish there was a 10 point rating system here, because it would allow a bit more nuance in my ratings. Ultimately, most of my ratings end up 3 stars, because I feel like the middle of the spectrum is where most games lie and needs the most nuance (I'd say 4 and 5 star games are generally the 8-10 range, and 1 and 2 star games are the 1-3 star range, and 3 stars represents the whole 4-7 range). I don't want to trash the game and say it has only a 2 star rating, but I'd probably rate it a 5/10.

It's a flawed game, the input system is fiddly as hell and constantly takes you out of the story. The 'Green Dot' system, encouraging you to try to find every response, only waters down the game, forcing you to say things you don't necessarily want to say just to see everything (sorry Marianna, you don't bore me). Also, the game was ambiguous in the worst way. I was interested in the whole supernatural undertone of the story, and in the end, it seemed that was mostly a rug pull, with a tiny little hint of potential 'what if it was true' at the end.

So, if you're still reading this, I'm going to give you a warning that I wish I had going into the game, but some people might consider a spoiler. I think some things are best 'spoiled' to help manage expectations going in, but that's up to you, and this is a relatively minor spoiler, but you've been warned. The game never leaves the confines of the therapy room (at least not in the playthrough I went through, and I got every response). No matter how much it teases it, pretty much everything is conveyed by barely notable special effects, and actors sitting on a couch talking to a camera.

Also (another warning that could be considered a spoiler), you've been warned again...There isn't one specific murderer in the plot. The murderer changes from playthrough to playthrough, which is honestly not a great method, because it means most of the clues you get to who the murderer is, are essentially red herrings, since most of the plot stays the same, and only a few questions/responses are added to point out who the murderer is.

The characters are interesting, the premise has merit, but in the end... I just felt disappointed in the execution.

Also, Marianna can murder me anytime she likes (that's not a spoiler, don't worry)... Her performance is evocative, and just skillfully flirty enough to make you wish this was a dating sim instead of a murder mystery.

It's difficult to rate this game. I really enjoyed the story, the actors and piecing together what was really going on. However, I don't think the console port of this did the game any favours and I regret not playing it on PC.

On PC you can type out the questions, making it somewhat akin to Her Story where you have to pick up on what the patients are saying to ask the right questions. On console... I'm not typing out anything using a gamepad. You ask hundreds of questions over the course of the game, that would be intolerable. So, there are question prompts which fix that. However, this also creates a new problem in that it takes all the "game" out of it. I just cycled through all the questions, occasionally making a yes or no choice. There was very little thought required.

However, I still enjoyed watching the game.

6/10

I really enjoyed the game that this gets compared to the most (Her Story), but this is a fair bit messier. Don't get me wrong, Her Story certainly had its flaws because this FMV genre is tough to get right, especially for an indie team, but they didn't bother me as much as they do here.

It's just really hard to get to where you want to. You have to be painfully specific in the questions you ask, and sometimes the game trips up due to multiple trigger words in a sentence. It also talks about things it hasn't introduced yet. There's a hint system but it has a cooldown... on the plus side you can switch between the patients. I just find it frustrating; when it works it's great and conversational, but most of the time I just heard the people say they don't know what I'm talking about because this can be really obtuse. This is ambitious with an interesting concept, but like I said a small indie team just has a lot more problems hitting it.

With that said, it's an interesting story with good acting and a menacing ambient soundtrack. If you can dig through the shit, the problems, then there's a great game here. Unfortunately, it actually made me mad more than it should have. I'm still giving it a recommendation though.