For the last months, I’ve been on a true-crime documentary binge-watching spree. I’ve seen a fair share of interrogations to know getting a confession is not easy at all. In Interrogation: you will be deceived you can be the detective and find out how good you are in getting devious people to open up. A confession might even save a lot of lives.
Detective work
In Interrogation: You will be deceived, you are an unnamed detective who’s been assigned a case of a burglary gone wrong. Besides breaking and entering another way more heinous crime occurred: murder. Luckily the burglar was caught and is being brought in for questioning alongside the husband who reported his wife was killed after being robbed. After asking some questions it’s clear something way more sinister is going on. As it turns out, the husband seems to be part of a terrorist organization named The Liberation Front. After wrapping up your first case, you are assigned the leading detective spot in a task force set up to bring The Liberation Front to justice.
A case of dilated pupils
After you and your team manage to get in a secret Liberation Front chat room, you discover things could go really wrong for the city if The Liberation Front is not dealt with. Your team will find leads to pursue and bring in suspects for you to interrogate. Each new case is presented with an elaborate written case file for you to read. Once you are up to date with the case you bring in the suspects. From then on, you are left with your intuition and experience to uncover what needs to be uncovered. Some suspects will need to be sympathized with before they’ll open up, others need to be intimidated before they’ll speak. Finding the right approach will be key to your success.
With a heart rate monitor showing how much stress a suspect has, you have some sort of indication of your progress. The years of training also gave you the ability to spot how dilated the pupils are. This indicates how much the suspects are opening up to you. Some text options might seem unrelated at first but might be needed to influence the mood of the suspect before going for the actual confession. When all else fails you can stop the recording and roughen up your suspects a little bit to get them talking. This route might get you results but it also might get you a bad rep in the press and stop funding for your task force.
Manage your team
At the start, you are assigned three members to your team. It’s your task to manage your team in becoming the most efficient task force needed to succeed in the task at hand. Since each has its own expertise it’s vital you assign each member to the right task in order to get success. For instance, Jen with a background in psychology is way better suited to go interrogate a mentally ill person. On the other hand, Tab – the analytical computer guy – is way more suited to clean up the paperwork and keeping the powers that be happy. The assignment can mean more useful info on the Liberation Front but can also mean more funding for your task force.
In Interrogation: You Will Be Deceived, funding acts as a sort of RPG-lite currency. Appointing funding to teambuilding makes everybody in your team happy which means they’ll have a higher success rate when out on a job. Instead choosing to put more funds towards your informer program might give you vital information for the next interrogation. Allocating funds to a PR company might do you more random favors by the public in the form of information. All these things seem to have an impact on the next case which makes it a valuable gimmick to have besides the extremely well-written interrogations.
Neo-Noir
Interrogation: You Will Be Deceived looks awesome. It uses only black and white and mostly stills to tell its story but that’s more than enough to set the scene. Every still is hand-drawn which makes this game not only fun but also looking fantastic at the same time. During the interrogations, you can see your suspects’ emotional reaction being well portrayed by the only animation in the game. With no spoken text what-so-ever, you are left with a haunting soundtrack (and occasional sound effects) to keep you company. The Film Noir style fits surprisingly well with the current era, making this game more of a Neo-Noir detective adventure.
Conclusion
Interrogation: You Will Be Deceived is very heavy on “text” which could be a bit too much for some. I liked the narrative so much, I didn’t mind it at all. The added management elements offer some necessary variation to the game. Be prepared to fail more than once because Interrogation: You Will Be Deceived is not easy at all.
