Interrogation: You Will Be Deceived | PC Review

I love adventure games. They put me in the shoes of someone I am not in real life and allow me to do things I am not capable of in the real world. I love adventure games that take place in fantasy, horror or sci-fi environments, but also ones that take me to places on our planet that I have never seen before. This doesn’t always have to be an exotic location; it can also be a relatively mundane location, but with anything but a mundane story. This is exactly what the dark narrative game Interrogation: You Will Be Deceived gives us.

Special Skill Set

Interrogation, developed by Critique Gaming and published by Mixtvision, puts you in the shoes of a police interrogator. The hint is in the title. After having successfully finished the first interrogation of the game, you find out that there is a larger threat to handle. A terrorist organization called Liberation Front seems to have its claws in every element of society. You are appointed the head of the special team tasked with finding and eradicating this threat. You do this by appointing team members to tasks, allocating resources, and by keeping the people, press and brass happy. This sounds quite complicated, but is actually pretty straightforward and it all serves to hunt down your suspects to interrogate. This is where the fun starts.

Time Is Ticking

Once one or multiple suspects are brought in, it is your moment to shine. These interrogations are tense, especially if they’re timed. Depending on the difficulty (story mode or hardcore), the timer counts down either with each question you ask, or just relentlesly counts down. Add a very subtle, but nerve wracking, score and you have a recipe for stress. Can you get the information out of the suspects where the bomb is hidden? Or can you talk them into releasing their hostages? There is a lot on the line, and failure is not an option!

Failure Is Part Of The Plan

You will fail. A lot. It’s part of the game. If you fail a timed interrogation, you can start over, hopefully a bit wiser about what to ask. The difficulty is challenging, even on story mode, but if you keep your mind focused, you will find out the right way to question these subjects. You can get to the solution in basically three ways: by befriending them, by scaring them or a combination of the two. Scaring can be done by turning off the recorder and beating the crap out of your suspect, or by informing the suspect of what will happen to him when he doesn’t comply. But actions like this can also backfire on you, so be careful if you want to go the full torture route.

Memory Serves You

Every few chapters you can improve your skill set by selecting a ‘memory’. These memories are useful for you, usually during an interrogation. It can be something that will make people like you more, or make you more aware of pain points in a human’s body and thus a more effective torturer. You can also assign team members to bring in experts to help you get a better understanding of the Liberation Front. If you do these conversations right, you get more dialogue options in future interrogations that should make it easier to crack the suspects. Every decision you make in this game either helps or hinders you in finding the leadership of the organization, so make your choices wisely. Many of the dialogue options appear only once.

Stellar Writing

A game like Interrogation stands or falls with its writing, and it is stellar. The dialogue is superb and the game goes deep into the psyche of terrorism; what it means to live in a democracy, what makes people go down certain paths, and political and societal beliefs. It pushes you to see how far you are willing to go to get what you want and gives you several choices for the path you want to follow.

Actors Make It Real

This is all accompanied by excellent graphics. The people you interact with in the game are all played by actors and then rotoscoped, and that gives it a genuine atmosphere. It also adds the factor that not only what a suspect says, but also how he or she physically reacts is important in finding the truth. It’s all in black, white and grey, but it doesn’t invoke a noir feel. Interrogation feels very modern, very now, very unromantic.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed Interrogation. It’s one of those games that makes time fly and you want to play one more chapter or try one more time to see if you can crack the subject this time. It’s challenging, it’s deep, but without becoming overly complicated. It rewards the perceptive and intelligent players.

Due to multiple paths you can choose it also has replayability. I played the game completely by the book. I didn’t lay a finger on a suspect, but I would like to see how choosing a more violent path affects the outcome. The game is incredibly diverse in the type of folks you talk to. It’s also not afraid to drop in some humor every now and then, mostly through snarky suspects and likes to play with the tropes of the genre.  Interrogation promised a lot and delivers more.

This review is based on a PC copy of Interrogation: You Will Be Deceived provided by Big Games Machines for coverage purposes. The game is also available on Mac and Linux.