DUPERY
It’s a gloomy night in the City of Crime. Thick fog like a milky bowl of cereal of a depressed millennial covers the street and the shady businesses of the true criminal are thriving. Landlords, conmen, billionaires… Their greed sickens me, make my very bones tingle with loathing. But that’s what I am here for, the Detective. To help the floundering forces of the corrupt arm of the law to enact justice! Find the killers, the corrupt judges, false idols and bought journos. It’s a web of endless lies and misdirection, but with my coloured pins, trusty pieces of string and a cork board full of polaroids I cam work it out…
DUPERY is a demanding game. It is, also, one of the few deduction games that really put a big spotlight on the whole Deduction part of the experience. I note that because plenty of so called detective games do not really squeeze that aspect to much, being more narrative driven mini-puzzles than real clues and red herrings kind of conundrums that require you to have a trusty notebook by your side to note down bits. In most cases it’s pattern recognitions, matching symbols, making obvious connections.
But in DUPERY it is a whole system of layered bullsh… I mean, complexities. If I would point a fault of the game somewhere, it would be that the tutorial did not prepare me for how dense the game can be. I mean, it did its best, gently feeding me the core concepts of the experience, but it took many runs and hours for things to finally somewhat click! In short - you have a board of photos, each pic representing a location where a suspect resides.
Suspects are broadly divided into 4 main groups. Innocents are the good ones, often having abilities that help you scrounge up critical information. Meddlers are “technically good”, but their whole existence is about making your job more complicated - as their name suggests, I reckon. Underlings are the big bad criminals of the evil Syndicate and the main baddies you need to arrest. They come in variety of devious form, lying, misdirecting, bribing, killing, poisoning… they are trouble and are hardly ever straightforward to nail down. And then, Traitors. Gosh I loathe the purple bunch. These are also arrestable mega minds of messing your plans, with powerful abilities that can completely shuffle the board or force you into risky actions.
Now, the fun part. Roles and suspects can lie. Can be tainted. Influenced. There is, it seems, a good heft of them to learn and remember their peculiar idiosyncrasies, especially that each role behaves very differently when influenced or hiding. Reading the cards with meticulous comprehension is CRUCIAL part of the game. Every word matter and need to be understood with cosmic precision. If a baddie says he pretends to be a good guy but without lying, then he is a most devious monster, because the usual hints of revealing a good role that doesn’t act properly are gone. If a shady fellow pretends to be a role not on the roster, now you can narrow down the suspect list to those criminals who pretend to be a role outside of the suspected list.
Then the good fellas can be tripped over. By wannabes pretending to be big, tough criminals. By Accountants and Barkeepers changing, shifting numbers, moving alcohol to turn an innocent soul into a drunkard telling horrible fibs. Even your most trusty informants can be corrupted if there’s an influence on the board of some powerful, shady individual.
And so, the game becomes this fluid dance of information. You unravel the board, times goes by, and you get a hefty set of often contradictory data. Now it is time to carefully examine who is the first offender, the source of twisted information, the first step in cascade of misdirection. Make one false move, one wrong assumption and bam - you arrest the wrong person, your reputation takes a dive, Police might need to cut you off the case before the bloodthirsty journalists lambast them for working with a dunce.
The beauty of the game lies in the intricacies of the cases. They are always riveting puzzles to solve, always rife with a chance to mess things up. And, to my delight, it is all build on bones of a roguelike! Each successful case grants you a choice of a perk, varying in strength and utility, but never useless. Being able to completely eliminate certain roles from appearing or making sure that certain informants are always present on the suspect list… It’s all valuable and very fun additions to add some additional player agency to forming their own runs and aiding in their cases.
Not gonna sugarcoat it, this is a demanding game. A true cerebral sizzler that you simply can’t play if your brain is on the fritz. If you need your neurons to rest, catch a break, then DUPERY will be an exercise in futile exhaustion. But if your fresh grey mass needs a challenge, needs to flex, go to a mental gym? This game is perfect.
It has those supreme high highs and almost depressive lows. Getting a nasty case solved, finding all the loose ends, nailing the bastards before they are even revealed. Feeling that stroke of enlightened genius seep through the cosmos to make your third eye open to the layers of specialized bullshido the game is trying to use against you? Mwah, chef kiss, such a good feeling. And, consequently, having all the notes written down, all the thinking done and having your arrest bump a completely wrong person to crumble your architecture of supposed convictions feels like a kick in the grondle.
DUPERY is a great game that absolutely nails that mechanic of deduction for me. It feels a bit like a boardgame, a solo experience with cardboard and pawns on the board. And it is, definitely, not a title for everyone. It takes a particular enthusiast to divulge high enjoyment from a game so devious and proud of that fact. But if you like Noir vibes, being The Detective and untying complex knocks of logical traps, I am sure you’ll find plenty to love about this game.
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