Developers are constantly pushing the boundaries of how video games can be used as a unique and innovative storytelling medium. The field allows for a level of interactivity with the audience that’s impossible to achieve with books and movies. Story based games have seemed to form a recent trend in video gaming, with titles like Life is Strange and the recent FMV game Telling Lies centering the entire experience around the story they have to tell. Many of these games have been praised for their unique approach to telling compelling and emotionally captivating stories. Now, developer Critique Gaming is taking their own approach to storytelling by putting the player in the shoes of a police detective in Interrogation: You will be deceived, a game which tasks the player with conducting high-stakes interrogations and struggling with repetitive dialogue in order to bring down a powerful terrorist organization.
Interrogation casts the player as the head of a task force dedicated to stopping a sinister terrorist threat called the Liberation Front. While comparable games like L.A. Noire might see the player on the streets, partaking in gunfights and car chases, Interrogation limits the player’s scope almost entirely to its own namesake: coming face to face with criminals, and interrogating them. This is the core of the gameplay in Interrogation. Almost everything the player does is in the interrogation room, having a conversation. Like in many other games, you are given a list of things to say, and each option will impact the conversation in different ways. In addition to leading the conversation, you can also influence your suspect’s mood, making them feel more tense or building a rapport in order to get them to open up to you more. If simply talking your way through a conversation isn’t enough, you are also given a few less orthodox methods of getting a suspect to loosen their tongue: namely pausing the tape recorder, and roughing them up.
On a technical level, the interrogation gameplay works fine. It’s as simple as choosing a dialogue option and seeing what happens. The problems start to appear when one considers as a whole almost any given interrogation in the game. While the characters themselves are largely well-written and consistent in their goals and personalities, their conversations can get rather clunky. The ideal goal is to find a dialogue option that gives you access to more pertinent information that will eventually persuade the suspect to confess. This is always easier said than done. When you start an interrogation you will be given a broad array of questions to ask the suspect that will give you information about them and their relation to whatever crime they’re suspected of. You are encouraged to ask most if not all of these questions, and some will lead to other lists of questions that will yield more information. This leads to the player having a great deal of information at their fingertips right off the bat. The problem is, not enough of this information matters. Only a select few of these introductory questions will lead to further conversation that will advance the interrogation in a meaningful way. The rest is basically just small talk.
Interrogation is at its best when you are actually having a conversation with your suspect. You ask a question and they respond in a way that yields follow-up questions, forcing you to choose the ideal question to keep the conversation moving while at the same time trying to make sure their mood stays where you want it to. These dialogues are engaging, and force you to apply your knowledge of the suspect (files are provided at the start of every mission) as well as your own skill as a detective. The problem is, these genuine, high-stakes dialogues are very brief, and typically one will only last for four or five lines before you’re spit back out at the initial list of questions. Questions can be asked multiple times, and will sometimes yield different results depending on information you’ve gleaned or the suspect’s mood. While this sounds good on paper, in practice it usually means each interrogation ends with the player cycling through every possible dialogue option in order to find the one that will advance the plot. This is frustrating, and it totally breaks the immersion.
In addition to dialogue and police brutality, Interrogation offers a few twists on the core gameplay in order to shake things up. You will almost always be interviewing multiple people at once, requiring you to switch between suspects in order to corroborate details or confront lies. A significant amount of interviews are also timed. These missions have timers that will decrease by five seconds every time you ask a question. While this isn’t quite realistic, especially when your suspect opens up with an impassioned monologue in the span of five seconds or less, it’s an admirable way to raise the stakes without putting too much pressure on the player. It does, however, put another layer of stress onto the aforementioned repetition; it’s frustrating enough to have to cycle through dialogue choices without worrying that once you’ve found the right one you won’t have enough time to follow up on it.
In addition to the main interview gameplay, Interrogation offers a few side activities to shake things up. Occasionally you’ll have to solve a brief puzzle in order to assemble the evidence needed for your task force to apprehend the next suspect. These puzzles are brief and considerably easy, but they offer an amusing distraction from the heaviness of the interrogation room. Additionally, you’re given control of your task force’s budget, as well as the activities of its members; between each interrogation you can choose a mission for each of your agents to pursue, and you can use your budget’s funds to pursue activities that will benefit the whole department. While this is an entertaining bit of strategy, the outcomes of each decision made here never feel as impactful as they should, and much of the time these choices felt more like story beats than significant gameplay choices. This would be fine in itself but these story beats are rarely expounded on. If you spend a lot of money on PR assistance, for one thing, an NPC might mention it later in the game, but that will be about the extent of it. Your PR might not even improve.
Between missions you will often encounter dialogue-heavy cutscenes involving the members of your task force, as well as other side characters like the chief of police, the mayor’s assistant, and a few news reporters. Most of these cutscenes feel high-stakes without properly defining what the stakes are, and it’s easy to end a press interview scratching your head over whether or not you’ve said the right thing, or whether the game even really cares. That being said, it’s hard not to feel at least a little endearment for the scenes in which you go out for a drink with your task force. The NPCs in your task force are some of the most well-written characters in the game, with clearly developed personalities and genuinely engaging backstories. Going drinking with them serves as a genuinely enjoyable intermission in the heavy emotional weight of the game’s story.
The story is an engaging one. Critique Gaming did a good job of making the suspects feel like real people, and it’s often shocking to see the broad scope of people who have joined the sinister terrorist organization you’re trying to take down. They raise some genuinely interesting points about society as a whole, and manage to tackle some pretty complex issues. Despite the art style, the game has very few if any noir elements; your suspects are largely idealistic individuals trying to make a difference, rather than hardened criminals only in it for the cash. While the subversion of genre is unexpected, it was surprising to see how nuanced the portrayal of the Liberation Front was.
Interrogation: You will be deceived is a game with a lot of heart and not a lot of polish. While it delivers a compelling message told by authentic characters, the message is wrapped in clunky dialogue made inorganic by forced repetition. Critique Gaming had a lot of great ideas for the story, and while the execution needs work, the effort is plain to see. This game is a labor of love, and it’s a bit of a letdown that it didn’t turn out better than it is.
Next: 20 Best Detective Movies of All Time
Interrogation: You will be deceived is available now on PC. A digital PC code was provided to Screen Rant for purposes of review.
