Interrogation: You will be deceived Review

I love it when a game pops up that involves interrogating people to try to gain truth and figure out lies. Very few games like this are on the market. Off the top of my head I think of the Phoenix Wright titles, LA Noire and a few others dotted around. When I spotted Interrogation: You will be deceived on the Nintendo eShop, I knew it was one to look at seriously.

Interrogation: You will be deceived is available on PC, Nintendo Switch and even iOS and Android so it isn’t a particularly demanding game. This title was developed by Critique Gaming and published by Mixtvision back in December 2019. In Interrogation: You will be deceived, you’ll take charge of a police detective tasked with bringing down a dangerous terrorist group. It is your job to interrogate suspects and manage your own team and its reputation. With time ticking down on the clock, how far will you go to stop these criminals operating? Manipulation, threats or even torture?

It’s important to note that this is Critique’s first outing in the gaming world. You’ll spend a lot of time in Interrogation: You will be deceived, interviewing a lot of dodgy people as well as managing your team in the background. The ultimate goal here however is to use your detective operation skills to prevent and catch a dangerous terrorist organisation as has been mentioned above. The first thing you’ll notice is the art style, which I particularly liked for a game of this style and genre. Black and grey backdrops with seemingly hand drawn characters with ever moving changes in their display of emotions and comfort stance.

The majority of the game is spent within the interview room itself, engaging with suspicious characters and criminals. What I really liked about this was not being able to tell just by stereotyping and how true to real life it could be drawing information from these people. As you probably guessed, it’s pretty much purely dialogue based and you’ll be able to choose what questions you put forward and then expand on the answers which surprised me. Often in games like that you pluck out the question, gain a response and receive your response and that’s that. Here you have to be particular and patient with your questioning skills, you’ll want to evolve these skills into open questions to allow the suspect to talk more. Be wary of how you proceed with these questions as going in heavy handed at the start can put defendants on the back foot, which can make them more reluctant to answer you. You then will have to find another technique to get what you need from them. This leads me on to other tools at your disposal, you’ll have some meters where you can see their heart rate and how compliant they are. But also you’ll be able to turn off the tape recorder and smack them about and intimidate them to try to break them this way. You will need to keep your eye on the timings as a lot of interactions are timed.

There are points during the game where you’ll be able to flit between two suspects and question them and try to suss out if they are rubbing off each other and find holes in the story. This adds a whole new spin onto the interrogation elements and made it a lot more interesting. You will quickly learn when to switch from one character to the next as you unravel the story.

Once you get through the first initial part of the game, you’ll be partly focused on your individual character and his traits. You’ll be able to choose certain perks such as being empathetic or extra avenues to become increasingly threatening. You genuinely feel like these perks changed specific outcomes of questioning and occasionally serves you well if you time things right. What really impressed me though was each and every character I felt compelled to get to know them, invested in their backstory and felt a connection with them. You can tell a lot of work has gone into the character profiling, the backstory and the surrounding dialogue. The team that you’ll have working with you also have their own profile and story as well, which was genuinely interesting to read and find out. I won’t spoil things by revealing any of the context as I feel it is very important to experience first hand.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed Interrogation: You will be deceived. Even though my playthrough was complete in a 6 hour round train journey, it kept me engaged the entire time. For the price point it is more than worth your investment for its unique spin on interrogation, its detailed hand drawn art style, compelling storylines and structured dialogue and questioning. It fares really well on the Nintendo Switch, which is where I played this one and would love to see it enter and succeed on the rival consoles. If you’re looking for something casual with that feel of getting stuck into a real good book, then Interrogation: You will be deceived is right up your street!

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Nintendo Switch code was provided to Bonus Stage for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to press@4gn.co.uk.