Gods Will Be Watching developer Deconstructeam has unveiled its new project, The Red Strings Club, a point-and-click adventure—or, if that description doesn’t ignite your neon, “a cyberpunk narrative experience about fate and happiness featuring the extensive use of pottery, bartending and impersonating people on the phone to take down a corporate conspiracy.” Okay, that sounds more like our wheelhouse.
The tale revolves around a plan to eliminate depression, anger, and fear from society through Social Psyche Welfare, a system about to be introduced to the world by Supercontinent Ltd. But a bartender and a “freelance hacker” aren’t down with the plan—free-thinking and all that stuff, I guess—and so they set off to bring it down. Their efforts to remove the shackles of corporate oversight will include “psychological bartending” (get people drunk and then pump them for information), “genetic implant pottery” (DIY mind-control devices, as best I can tell), and “vocal corporate espionage” (prank phone calls).
It sounds like a lark but the trailer hints at something grimmer, while the description on Steam suggests that the story will contemplate weightier concerns, including “what does happiness mean and what lengths are permissible to obtain it.”
That’s in line with Deconstructeam’s previous effort, Gods Will Be Watching, which forced players to make very difficult decisions in morally ambiguous (or just straight up bad) situations—a path of “a hundred tiny little steps down that road to Hell paved with good intentions”. That’s a good place to start—I just hope that The Red Strings Club won’t also emulate Gods Will Be Watching’s unforgiving difficulty: The game was so ferocious that Deconstructeam eventually dialed it back with a patch that was literally called the “Mercy Update.”
The Red Strings Club is expected to be out in January. Find out more at deconstructeam.com.