Need to Know

I could not stop playing and finished in 2 days

Backed it on Kickstarter (I'm even in the credits if you looked!), played it, abandoned it for a few years, and then finally finished it, doesn't mean it's a boring game, hear me out. Need to Know came from the era of Orwell - which I've also played, loved and reviewed - basically pattern matching gameplay laid on top of a "visual" novel (only without boobs). The gameplay, while has to be involved and brain-teasing, needs to tells a story. Orwell excelled with being a more aggressively ramped-up authoritarian nightmare. A seemingly more far-fetched future. A story where an outsider can help control information, narratives, and through that, the truth and history. (Mild spoilers ahead, skip next paragraph if you don't wanna know anything) Need to Know, on the other hand, writes a story in a near future - where we may be right now, or in a few years. You play as a US citizen, whose sole power is to prosecute, to "just follow orders", and meanwhile trying to survive a personal political hell. You play yourself into becoming a regular crimer, a warcrimer, and a national terrorist. You see repercussion of your own actions in the story. You may justify yourself into believing you're fighting for "the truth"; yet the information you are given keeps getting worse, and it makes you wonder if you're becoming a eugenicist and a fascist. At that point, the only winning move may just be not to play, or yeet yourself into prison. (Spoiler over) If you choose to play on, the gameplay is more involved than Orwell - while Orwell only makes you marks single pieces of evidence, Need to Know makes you show the link between different pieces of seemingly unrelated information - only becoming related because you are given inside knowledge of what they may have been doing. Messages, tweets, locations, bank statements, satellite images, heartbeats - all the data we give willingly these days - can and will be used against them. You request more data, you use that data to find incriminating evidence, and you string them together to prosecute them. Everyday is like a mini-Sherlock Holmes mind palace minigame, only it keeps getting more complicated. It can get repetitive, but being engaged to the story and the new data types will help mitigate it a little bit. The game represents a possible future, and you are a judge, jury, and executioner. Have fun doing war crimes.

I do recommend this game but it’s not without its faults and some of those are gameplay problems. I would give this a 3/5 if such a ratings system existed on Steam. This game reminds me a lot of Papers, Please but it lacks the urgency of PP. There is a clock ticking down but as far as I could tell there were no repercussions to letting it run out. Most of the missions were solved within 2 hours of the clock ticking and there’s no pro or con to finishing by a certain time. This is one of many parts of the game where I thought, “Why is this here, it serves no purpose”. The after work missions get extremely tedious. I did all of them but I wonder if you didn’t whether the ending would have been different. Something tells me it would not have mattered. You get money but besides one particular time, it doesn’t matter if you do anything with it or not. There’s another after work “task” that you can do that does nothing other than add a distraction (trying to be vague to be spoiler free here) and I stopped doing it halfway through the game with again, no repercussions. Trying to select points on the map is a huge pain especially when there are multiple suspects in a location. The map keeps scrolling and the location point doesn’t lock very well onto the mouse. A lot (all maybe?) of the dialogue screens are off-center and near the bottom of the screen. So you’re watching a cut scene and it’s in the bottom 30% of your computer monitor and not centered. Seems like a weird style choice along with half-hiding the graphics for home/office/etc. There are a couple of missions that I had to write down data or take pictures of the screen to correlate data between people because there wasn’t a good way of doing this in game. Also had some graphics issues where the screen would bounce around randomly. The last act of the game really tried my patience. I had to restart multiple levels because the data I was pulling wasn’t right and this is already a very lengthy game where there isn’t a meaningful change in mechanics so it was feeling REALLY tedious by this point. All that having been said, I did enjoy the game from a storyline standpoint and the data correlation/searching aspect. If there was a sequel with the gameplay problems fixed and the stakes were higher, I would definitely check it out.

I do not recommend this game, because it is often unclear how to play. For instance: I could not figure out how to flag multiple pieces of evidence, and at the end, this counts against your score. The Rialto app/mechanics of how THAT system works is similarly confusing. It could've been a fun game if it weren't for buggy/confusing mechanics. I usually love this type of game. Disappointing.

Fun game for if you enjoy working for the government or "good guys" in games. Humour is awesome too.

Ended up refunding as the game kept glitching and making me exit out. Navigation between in-game pages was super difficult and the gameplay was overall not interesting enough to forgive the major bugs.

So overall I would recommend this game, it has decent writing, somewhat annoying music sometimes but overall is pretty good and sets a proper mood for what you are setting out to do. Unfortunately there are many, various and sundry game breaking bugs and it has been abandoned. I ran into multiple soft locks and finally was unable to progress further as the game wouldn't recognize that I completed all the available tasks, and it doesn't time out if you let it just sit, it will lock at 4:59pm (so no need to rush anything either.. boo) Some of the changes are very poorly explained and the story writing doesn't always track with your actual performance (100% and you are told you aren't good enough, or 35% and you are congratulated and promoted lol) Sadly the developer bounced, this just needed some bug fixes to be a strong entry.