Knee Deep

Knee Deep is a weird fuckin’ game.

Both in concept and execution. Leans more weird on the latter than the former, though certainly I feel like you couldn’t put some of this down onto paper and act as if you’re not operating in the bizarre. My impression, going in, was that this would be a sort-of budget Life is Strange, but aside from the core concept of digging up a small town’s past in order to solve a mystery — which itself, from what I understand, is more a Twin Peaks thing — they really aren’t all that similar. If anything, the first thing I think of is Deadly Premonition. The bulk of the game involves interacting with characters who don’t quite come off like normal people and go through a mystery that steadily goes further and further off the rails the deeper in you go and it keeps an absolutely straight face about it the whole way through. As something to show to other people, be it for a stream or a game night or something, it’s a great experience. On its own… it’s a bit more complicated than that.

The game itself concerns the mystery of one Tom Cruise Tag Kern, who has seemingly hung himself while filming on-location in the town of Cyprus Knee, Miami. You play as three revolving protagonists — blogger Romana Teague (blogging, in this universe, apparently being the most important thing in the world), local reporter Jack Bellet, and private investigator K.C. Gaddis — who each investigate the events surrounding his death and dig up more than they can chew, finding questions about the Scientology Church of Us agents stationed in the city, the city’s councils plan to drain the swamp, and whether the suicide of Tom Cruise Tag Kern is entirely what it seems. The gameplay is fairly simple — you select dialogue options and make decisions, with these decisions then (well, theoretically) determining how characters think of you and changing the direction in which the story goes. There are a couple of (very easy to brute force) puzzles but otherwise there are no, like, adventure game segments where you walk around or anything: the onus is entirely on dialogue and choices and through this, the story that you begin to unfold across all three episodes/acts of this “swamp noir.”

And the first thing I’d really like to compliment Knee Deep for is its aesthetic. The game is presented as if it’s a stage play, and while it always felt more like a gimmick than a fully ingrained part of the experience, I think ultimately that this artistic choice really did a lot to contribute to the overall vibe of the game. The idea is that the characters are actually actors and the town they walk around is simply just a stage, but the stage itself is so ridiculously large and unfeasible that it’s impossible to imagine what you’re seeing as a real production, which really helps contribute to the surreal, off-kilter vibe of the game. There are also a ton of little things linked in with the presentation that are neat as well: the walls of buildings will slide down to reveal what’s inside whenever a scene goes from outdoors to indoors. There’s this one NPC who seems to double for every minor “shopkeeper” role so every time a scene takes place inside a shop he has to run onto the stage to play his part. The audience will ooh and ahh at each major twist. It’s little things like that that totally sell the whole stage play thing. Later episodes try to lean into it a little too hard by introducing a greek chorus that doesn't really work that well, but the idea itself and the little things in service of that are memorable and fun and really help bring the game into its own, in terms of being a unique experience.

I also think that the interactive narrative system is designed fairly well. It falls into the same traps a lot of interactive narrative systems do — ultimately everything centralizes into the one ending because there’s only so much a writer can have the player’s choices ultimately matter — but the journey there does a pretty good job at remembering what you did and branching accordingly. This mostly comes down to the game’s main focus being on dialogue and interaction between characters, and most choices working on that small scale accordingly. NPCs will remember what in particular you say to them, and the game points out whenever a choice has influenced what someone has said, which works to make the player intrigued as to where exactly their choices have taken them. The game also does a pretty great job at having things that seem little at the time — mentions of wild animals, a person whose existence depends on a choose-your-own-backstory choice on your part — and then proceeding to give them sudden relevance later. It’s a small thing (and not expressly related to player choice) but in a game that proclaims everything can be a butterfly effect, it’s nice to see just how little things can affect the plot in major ways.

Those are where my compliments end, though. While I do think the game is well constructed in certain areas, and while I was certainly entertained from beginning to end… that was in spite of the game, rather than because of it. The main issue is that the writing is rouuuuuuuuuuugh. In a game that leans on dialogue to tell its story none of the characters talk like real people do, and while this could lean into the whole “stage play” theme, a lot of it seems unintended more than anything. Most of the characters (including some of the player characters) come off as some flavour of asshole without a lot of positive traits to them. Characters will often talk past one another and respond in ways that make no sense in conjunction with what was just said. Jokes or concepts that were funny or interesting the first time get repeated at least three times to the point where what was originally cool about it isn’t. The story absolutely loses its mind from the second chapter onwards, and while it’s entertaining, certainly, you have to trudge through two hours of bland investigation before you start getting there — the results of which preceding to stop mattering to the plot after the first act aside from setting up one or two plot threads.

Perhaps the character most emblematic of the problems with the game’s writing is Romana Teague; the first of the three player characters, and the one you play most. There’s just this whole “quIRKy!!!” kind of aesthetic around her that permeates her sections and makes conversation sections with her kind of painful to go through, as this kind of penGUIN of DOOM!!! thing is present in nearly all the things she says, even beyond the dedicated “say something strange” option you can pick at nearly every dialogue choice. There’s also… this super weird disconnect from reality with nearly everything she does. Characters will never react to anything she says or does like any person realistically would, the most she gets being the occasional “man, you’re weird” before continuing on with what they otherwise would’ve said in the dialogue tree. There’s a scene where she can deadass assault one of the other player characters in the middle of what is presumably a public place and there are no consequences for it whatsoever. The most that happens is the person she punches just being like “man, you have a mean backhand” and then it’s never acknowledged again. And, like, one of the other player characters is a caustic asshole (to the point where his equivalent to Ramona’s “say wacky things” is “say something belligerent”) but at least the cut of his jib is funny and other characters appropriately don’t want anything to deal with him. Romana just… mostly kind of feels like a manic pixie dream OC, and while the game is very earnest in how weird it is every section where you play as Romana kind of brings it down, both because the weirdness on her part feels very artificial and because most of her stuff is… for lack of a better word, kinda cringe.

There are other bits and bobs that bring it down too. The game has… a marked tendency to put on the player what certain bits of backstory are through choice, which oftentimes left me just kinda unsure of what I was supposed to pick or why I would want to really pick any of the options there. There are bugs and softlocks aplenty, to the point where in this choice-based game I was forced into picking certain major choices because if I picked the other option the game would become unplayable. The handling of race and race issues is… not great. Beyond POC characters who were obviously written by white people, the way the game tackles it is… it’s kinda like it sorta decides it stops caring about even attempting to be sensitive partway through. There’s a Native American protester introduced in episode 1 who is portrayed as a fairly normal, down to earth dude, and then his first appearance in the second episode he goes into a story about how he got a head injury and now he can talk to the gods and he gets loonier from there. I… don’t particularly want to go into this one — mostly because I’m white and Australian and I don’t have near any of the knowledge or experience needed to talk about a lot of this — but the way he suddenly got derailed into full stereotype left a bad taste in my mouth.

And ultimately… I don’t know. I’m realizing a little bit right now that maybe I’m less positive on this game than I thought going into this review, but… even with the issues with the writing and all the other things that bring it down into ‘obviously not good’ territory I do think the things that work for it — the presentation, the choice system — are things that I’m willing to bat for. It’s certainly like Deadly Premonition or a David Cage game where half the fun is mostly in reacting to how bonkers it can get with friends or an audience and such, but even then… I think, even beyond the entertainment value, it’s still worth playing for yourself. Even if it’s not quite the greatest thing in the world.