Each one has their own sort of mini-game, but serving more as props than puzzles to be solved. Akara-184 is a Supercontinent Ltd “empathy android”, whose job is to make people happy. Brandeis is a freelance hacker and tech-anarchist. Donovan is the owner and bartender of the game’s eponymous boozer, and also an information broker. In The Red Strings Club, you take turns playing as one of three characters. And something about the moral and ethical limits of self-determination, which – it turns out – I believe should be entirely unlimited, except when I don’t.Īnd at the end of the game, I chose love over saving the planet, so besides being an inconsistent hypocrite, I’m also a sentimental asshole. The “questionable” part is very important, but I can’t explain much more than that without blowing the plot.
#The red strings club game reviews series
Instead, it’s a series of conversations and decisions that expose your own cognitive dissonances while mixing virtual cocktails, installing cybernetic implants, and using clever social engineering to infiltrate a megacorp and disrupt its deployment of a questionable firmware upgrade. Anyway, The Red Strings Club isn’t like Beneath a Steel Sky, or anything else I’ve ever played, for that matter. So that’s a problem, but also a whole other thing. With its nostalgic retro-pixelart aesthetics and “narrative experience” blurb on Steam, I’d assumed this game would be something like Beneath a Steel Sky, perhaps, or… actually, that’s the only other cyberpunk point-and-click game I can think of, and it’s been out almost 25 years already.