Deadeye Deepfake Simulacrum

Deadeye Deepfake Simulacrum is a game of two interlocking themes.

First theme, the more obvious one, is an idea of an interconnected network of things. Player is put inside an environment that feels like an accelerated version of our contemporary IoT designs, except with every single device having a direct access to something else, weaving a web of interest points the player can engage with. The player character is in no way separate from the world, being able to engage with every device they encounter - and while they do seem to stand at a privileged position, being able to hack the devices and bend them to their will, there are still moments reminding you of your place as just an another device in the network - like enemies trying to hack you, or punishments inflicted upon your body by the network's firewall.

The second theme is the theme of hyperreality. Honestly, the ways it presents this idea are what really sells this game for me. The boundaries between the real and the virtual, and between human and non-human have been completely erased, presenting an actually unique and exciting world to engage with. You can hack into a fridge and eat the contents with terminal commands. You can buy yourself a new body on the web. What helps drive the point home however, are the graphics. While pretty simplistic, they fit so well with this idea that I couldn't imagine this game in any other artstyle - maybe except for Second Life-esque obvious 3D virtuality with uncanny character avatars. The reason they fit so well is because they strongly suggest themselves to be representations of something else., while being (usually) not representative of anything in particular. While in Caves of Qud you have no problem bridging the gap between the symbols and whatever they represent, here the symbols seem to be creating their own reality separated from whatever they were supposed to invoke in the first place. The player is constantly struggling to understand this world. Is what I see on the screen a representation of this (imagined) reality- or is this the exact (imagined) reality itself? Is there actually any difference between the two?

Same thing with player abilities. The most prominent one is the ability to slow down time at a push of a button, which uses up one of your energy bars, but there are many more you can unlock during the course of the game, with some being simple expansions of whatever abilities the player character possess (like athletics or hacking) and others being reminiscent of magic spells (like necromancy and esper trees). While at the start of the game I was worried that game with its minimalistic environments could become stale fast, the unlockable abilities keep it fresh. Are you casting any actual magic orbs? Are these just names for something else, like glitches or exploits? Does it make any difference?

I wholeheartedly recommend this game. It presents you with exciting alien environment and then fully immerses you inside, letting you engage with something really unusual. The music is nice, and the writing is really cute (and yes, of course it's another way to raise questions and carry the theme!). The characters are charming and the plot is interesting enough, with a lot of mysteries to unravel, and there seems to be at least an illusion of a player choice allowing you to guide the story into different directions. While the random levels are nothing to write home about, the story missions put you in very interesting puzzle-like environments.

Of course, it being an early access title, the game is by no means perfect. The graphics, while perfect in how they deliver the themes of the game, make visual identification very hard sometimes. The most prominent example here are ranged weapons. While randomly generated looks are fun in their own way, comparing stats is often a hassle. You have to manually pick up every single weapon from the floor and read the text of the stats it has - and you can't know your enemy is equipped with a rocket launcher (which is a vital piece of information) until they start shooting at you. Another case is the train mission, where I kept falling down from the map and dying - and in what an unsatisfying way, the reason for that being unclear boundaries of the player character hitbox. The game is extremely difficult with many of the enemies being capable of taking you out with one hit unless you specifically spec your character in survivability. While this encourages careful gameplay, it also means that single mistake can put you back a lot, forcing you to type all the commands for all the devices again, as there is no in-mission saving system. This is especially the case in story missions, which quickly become very long and intricate. I also feel that it's too hard to unlock new abilities and perks, and the game suffers for that - the abilities are really fun, and they keep the gameplay fresh. Perhaps it would be better if instead of unlocking entire trees very rarely, you could unlock single abilities more often - encouraging experimentation with whatever new toy you have, and avoiding overwhelming the player with bulk ability unlocks. Some QoL upgrades could be nice, such as network graph auto-scrolling to wherever your camera is.

I'm very excited to see how the game develops further. The themes and the ways they are presented are perfect, and I want to see more of that. Gameplay delivers the ideas behind the game world, and at the same time presents you with fun ways to interact with the environment - and there's a lot of room to make it even better, especially with input from early access players.

Fair warning. The combat and hacking can take a moment to get used to, but trust me - both systems make sense in the grand scheme of things.