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• dakkie

  Aug 7, 2023

  the kind of game that makes you stop to genuinely think about the existence and capabilities of ai and bioengineering in our world, a la detroit become human. i'd always wanted to play dbh, but not owning a playstation and being the kind of gamer that prefers much more simplistic game play mechanics has prevented me from doing so. the red strings club was the perfect alternative i didn't even know existed. i had this game sitting in my library for a few years after buying it in a bundle and generally forgetting about its existence. i had skimmed over it many times, citing a disinterest in it because of my lack of knowledge on the premise. to that extent, i fully think my past self was an idiot. i wish i had just said fuck it and played it sooner. the game is heavily dependent on the choices of the player and the drinks brewed. there is much more choice based on the emotions induced by the drinks, so much so that i had looked up a walkthrough after the very first encounter. i'm the type of player that generally has a lot of anxiety based on making the wrong decisions and found that while i could experience all the contents of the game for myself, looking up which drinks to mix with each dialogue options and the non-story related achievements helped me tremendously. many others more bold than me still had an amazing time playing without the walkthrough, so it's definitely up to the individual whether or not they decide to replicate my play style. many of the clients and conversations within the game had me genuinely stopping and thinking about the ethics of brainwashing and relinquishing our human emotions. i thought about who i would be without my anxiety or depression, that has shaped my morality and relationships with others. i thought about the individuality of my own human existence and how it relates to society and technology. i thought my own emotions and the extremes i have felt with them. for a game about technology, it really encourages conversation about how we as humans interact with each other and feel. i really enjoyed this experience. i wish it brought back the pottery mechanics mostly, and i definitely wish it was longer. there were missed opportunities to explain the terrorist organization PROXYM, which i would love to learn more about considering the second main character, brandeis, was closely affiliated with them. there was also hints about donovan's past and how he acquired the club that are never explored. also, what was the deal with gost????? for the length of the game, there is a LOT of information the player needs to unpack, so i understand why these avenues weren't explored, but i am definitely hoping for a sequel! there is still a story untold here. i thought the bartending mechanics were unique and definitely not unenjoyable, i saw a review that stated v4-11 hall-a's was better, but i actually preferred this one. tapping into human emotion to collect information through drinks was so much fun! it also allowed the player to understand every side character (except for gost but i imagine he's not supposed to be understood) through their hidden emotions. all in all, the main game play was very fitting. making the drinks more complex would only detract from how story rich this game is. i wish i could recommend buying this game full price, but it is very short. on sale is a must!!! if you've got money laying around, don't wait! but if you're just not able to buy a 4 hour game for 15 bucks, that's enitrely understood. the inner dialogue this game provides is priceless, though, and as a passive enjoyer of philosophy, i will be thinking about it for weeks to come.
• bunsen

  Aug 9, 2023

  holy shit
• gamedeal user

  Dec 21, 2018

  After 35 years of gaming, it's hard for games to hype me nowadays. This one had me after its first 10 seconds and so far - I'm about 110 minutes in the game now - I am still deeply in love. Extremely beautiful visual-novel-like, minigame-enhanced cyberpunk adventure that is giving me a Beneath the steel sky-feel. Outstanding pixelart, soundFX, music, writing - a must-play! EDIT: Just completed the game and this was one of my most fulfilling gaming experiences ever. Outstanding, incredible, inspiring. Gotta play this or you missed out on something great.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 7, 2019

  [h1]Liquor for the soul. [/h1] The Red Strings Club is a cyberpunk narrative game set in a world on the verge of a catastrophe. You play as Donovan, an information broker and the proprietor of The Red Strings Club. When a damaged android shows up on your doorstep, you begin to uncover the plot of one of the world’s most powerful corporations to control the thoughts and feelings of all of humanity. Over the course of the game, you’ll talk to a few different characters involved in order to figure out what’s going on, and more importantly how to stop it. [h1]Positives: [/h1] [list][*]I really love the art here, this is some slick pixel art and it looks great throughout. All of the characters are well designed, and I thought the background art was great too. Some of the animations look a little stiff, but for the most part they’re fine. [*]TRSC’s main appeal is the story it tells, and while some have complained about it being too cliché, I thought it was interesting and rather compelling. It’s hard to talk about without giving too much away, but I found the main plot to be unique and talking to all the different characters to figure out what’s going on was very enjoyable, and of course rather satisfying once it had all come together. [*]The characters themselves are well fleshed out and each character has a very distinct personality. Once you get into the bartending stuff and you’re mixing drinks for specific personality traits, you bring some more stuff out of the characters and I thought all of this was well executed. [*]The bartending minigame itself isn’t too complicated, but I did enjoy mixing the drinks. It’s a bit more involved than VA-11 HALL-A was and I actually found it quite challenging at times. Mixing drinks to bring out different personality traits is a really cool concept too. [*]The synth-y soundtrack is excellent and I found that it helped immerse me in the game, I didn’t even realize until right at the end that none of the characters were voiced because I was so into it. [/list] [h1]Neutral: [/h1] [list][*]It is fairly short for a $15 game, coming in at around 2-3 hours for a single playthrough and there’s not much replay value unless you’re aiming to get all the achievements which does require at least two playthroughs. [/list] [h1]Negatives:[/h1] [list][*]While the writing is excellent for the most part, there are a few things that felt shoehorned into the game and really took me out of the experience. There’s some stuff about game development that I thought didn’t really fit in, there’s also a relationship that doesn’t really become clear until the end of the game that I felt was unnecessary and didn’t make sense for the characters. There’s a couple of other things too, but I don’t want to go into anymore detail as it would spoil other parts of the game. [*]There’s a minigame at the beginning of the game where you’re essentially making pottery by sculpting a mass down to a blueprint using different tools, controlled by the mouse. This minigame is not fun, and I disliked it so much the first time I played this game that I actually gave up on playing it. [*]I did notice a few typos while playing through the game. [/list] [h1]Verdict: [/h1] The Red Strings Club tells a great cyberpunk story, uncovering the plot is compelling and the characters are really well written. Unfortunately, it suffers slightly from having some unnecessary writing shoehorned in, and a particularly unenjoyable minigame. I’d say it’s well worth picking up on sale, especially if you have an interest in the cyberpunk genre, but it’s not really worth full price. If you found this review helpful, please consider following my curator page: [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/33633486/]Kemo's Corner.[/url]
• gamedeal user

  Apr 17, 2021

  [h1]"Games can solve emotional appeals like movies and books."[/h1] I think of this sentence every time I encounter an excellent game work. Especially when looking at the empty desktop at the end of the game, this kind of thought is the strongest, as if it was a wake up from a big dream. I really like this design and the overall rhythm. It makes the player's emotions come to an abrupt end when it reaches its peak, leaving a turbulent mood stuck in the chest for a long time, and the strong impact of illusion and reality makes people really dizzy like drinking a glass of booze. I realized in a daze what is called [b]the ninth art[/b]. I am a bartender, doing intelligence gathering work in a bar called the Red Strings Club. During this period, I have an Akara robot. She loves me and I love her.At the same time, I also discovered a shocking secret, which may be a heinous scam. I gradually thought about it in the chat with everyone: [b]Am i happy? What am I after? Will the things I pursue tomorrow change? What are we blocking, is it good or bad?[/b] The charm of cyberpunk is not imaginative settings or art styles, but people’s true self-reflection and struggle with confusion. It did not focus on describing the prosperous cyberpunk and the mechanical prosthesis, but only described a conspiracy about all mankind and a wine glass with only ice cubes left. Since we can't change the world, at least leave a trace of ourselves unchangeable by the world. The plot line of the game is not long, and it can be cleared in almost half a day, but in every dialogue and every choice, a lot of truth and understanding of human nature can be realized. The two words love and destiny run through the entire storyline, but from the beginning of the game you can know the tragic ending of Brandeis’s fall. At the beginning of the game, you definitely want to change this destiny. But I also said just now that since we can't change the world, then at least a trace of ourselves will not be changed by the world. The same is true of fate. Since fate cannot be changed, we must make the final resistance. We are humans, not Akara. [h1]Cocktails with ice, interlaced red strings of fate, and a doomed ending.[/h1]
• gamedeal user

  Oct 29, 2018

  [b][i]The Red Strings Club[/i] is near-universally well received, and for good reason.[/b] The artwork, ambience, characters, music, and mini-games are all expertly crafted. I went into this hoping for an experience similiar to [i]VA-11 Hall-A[/i], and it's pretty close in terms of mechanics. The whole thing is basically a visual novel, with some neat mini-games and some lite point-and-click elements. Choices definitely matter. The mini-games are actually a high point for [i]The Red Strings Club[/i]. [b]The problem I take here, and ultimately the reason for my downvote - is that the story is boring - [i]and it's all story[/i].[/b] Painting with broad brush strokes, this is a tale of corporate agendas and evil empires. It's been done to death folks. I think it wants to be edgy, but it mostly just comes off as sophomoric. To be crystal clear, I'm not saying the issues explored don't have merit, or aren't real. I just don't think these are new ideas or are explored in any novel ways. The writing is competent, but there were low points at times. My enjoyment declined proportionally as time went on. I was really excited and having a good time in the beginning, but as the evil corporate agendas started weighing in heavily with the story - things took a turn for the worst with me. What I am getting at is that even though one playthrough is only ~3 hours, I do feel like it overstayed it's welcome a bit. Other than letting someone else play, I have no motivation to try other story branches. Oddly, I found the themes and ideas in this game quite similiar to the experimental title [url=https://aetherinteractive.itch.io/localhost][i]LOCALHOST[/i][/url]. [i]LOCALHOST[/i] is a slightly shorter, and dare I say a more potent experience. Less try, more do. [b]Pros:[/b] +The ambience is perfect +The mini-games are brilliantly done +The characters have depth and are well thought out +Choices matter and they feel like they matter +The sound effects are fantastic [b]Meh:[/b] =The music is mostly great, but in some of the longer scenes it would drone on and repeat to almost a point that it was grating [b]Cons:[/b] -Oh how I wish the story were a bit more subtle and original -I'm not sure I think the price-point is great; yes, there is some replay value if you are motivated -Some of the writing went downhill in the later part of the game [b]Again, [i]The Red Strings Club[/i] is nothing short of a well-crafted experience, and how much you enjoy it largely comes down to how much you fall in love with the story.[/b] I personally wish they would have went with a more subtle story that was a bit more original.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 17, 2018

  I have very mixed feelings about this game. The art, music, and general atmosphere is spot-on. This game _is_ a work of Art, and on that level it can definitely be appreciated. The gameplay beyond the choose-your-own-dialogue-adventure is pretty much busywork, but that's not really the point and it would be unfair to judge it on that level. There's three major problems, though: First, human beings are kilogram-for-kilogram and liter-for-liter the most complex and intricate thing that we have ever observed. If you are going to make a game about THE MOST COMPLICATED THING, you are going to struggle if there's just one writer. An admirable attempt was made - a far better one than most could have done, myself included - but the same way a FPS has more than one graphic artist, this game deserved more than one person at the writer's table. The various personalities and motivations are written through the lens of a single person, and that does a disservice to a game that tries to tackle big questions about identity, motivation, and emotion. Similarly, it suffers from the same problem as most dialogue trees of this type: you often get only half of the line you're about to say, and when it comes out, it has a _completely_ different meaning than you intended. Or, when the character responds, your own character clarifies the position you've chosen with a clarification that _completely_ changes what you thought you were making your character say. The biggest, deepest questions posed to the player are often given only two to four choices with no branches behind them, which would be fine, except then your character says many more lines elaborating that stance _with a very specific justification_ in ways that affect the dialogue very frustratingly. It's fine not to ask my input - books and movies do that all the time - so if you're going to ask for it then don't make it feel like I'm rolling dice over what my character is actually going to say. These kinds of misunderstandings are a big unexpected gut-punch to player agency and they're usually avoided by playtesting but especially by having more writers who will notice each other's implicit assumptions. Second, it suffers from a lot of bugs in the dialogue tree. On several occasions I learned everything there was to know about something but because I hadn't triggered an earlier more vague response, I didn't ever complete the objective for learning about that topic. Similarly if I discovered things in the wrong order, let's say B and C, then upon learning A my character would be told, "now you just need to learn B and C" and then my character would act like they were just discovering this and were pondering hard about how to learn those things. The dialogue/event tree was not analyzed systematically enough, and this problem is persistent throughout the game. Third, it's written with a weird political Tourette. Science fiction usually tells deep stories in two ways: either it examines fundamental questions of being, asking the reader to examine which things are truly immutable and which are simply a consequence of their own present world, or it holds a mirror up to pressing contemporary issues by re-contextualizing them (or both). In a very jarring way this game tries to do the former, but then keeps accidentally acting like the latter. In other words, it tries to ask big philosophical questions, but then it keeps drifting into contemporary political language without actually examining contemporary issues. These are often written from an intellectual leftist perspective. Which segues to the best single example of the problem: If you're reading the negative reviews then you've probably seen mention of a question about whether women should continue to be oppressed: "Yes", "No", "What? Women aren't opppressed." That third response comes out of fucking NOWHERE. Hell, the _question_ comes out of fucking nowhere. It feels like a 1850-to-2050 question, not a big timeless one. And that response... Why the hell is it there? There's been nothing in the game by which I can make any sort of conclusion about gender politics _in this game world._ When I saw that option, my whole brain lurched back to the early 21st century. It blindsides the player with no connection to the rest of the game's themes, and disappears just as quickly. At this point in the game, most of the high-status people you've met up to that point in the game are women - probably due to the same motivations that led to that question being in the game. But you can't have it both ways - you can't depict a world that for all its cyberpunk failures, anecdotally seems to at least surpass ours in gender equality, and then also inject a random aside about the oppression of women. Ultimately, that one thing isn't all that bad - but it does indicate very well a problem that runs through the game, especially in the 2nd half: the writer's personal leftist politics pervade all of the dialogue, and what truly makes that bad is that it pervades _incidentally._ The author is not deliberately making political points as a thesis; on the contrary, their own non-contemporary, big-ideas story often has to trip and stumble around these irrelevant opinions on contemporary issues just to get from one plot point to the next. In summary the game is beautiful and resonant and I really want to like it. I wanted to like it _so much._ But really the best of the game is in the first half and it tends to fall apart more and more as it goes on, both in the quality of writing* and in the bugginess of the event causality. And what makes the first half good is the promise that it sets up for the second half, meaning even memory of that retroactively loses a lot of its warmth. If you just want to spend some time in a cyberpunk mood then maybe this will be worth your time and money; there's definitely a lot of love and craft, and it's wonderful to look at and listen to. But personally... I can't really recommend it. * Besides the aforementioned, the ending is kind of lame - no spoilers, but basically it revolves around a character archetype that's _really really hard_ to pull off dialogue for. You know, like time travel? It's notoriously hard to write a satisfying story about time travel. Same type of problem here. Very hard character to write, and in this case, valiant effort, honestly a decent try, but didn't really stick the landing.
• Magnanimous

  Jun 22, 2023

  There were dialogue trees that actually made me walk away from the computer and pace for a while just so I could think about my answer.
• gamedeal user

  Mar 24, 2019

  I bought this game hoping for an atmospheric cyberpunk experience, and walked away sorely disappointed. While The Red Strings Club *is* cyberpunk, it's as generic as cyberpunk can get. It has everything you would expect in a story like this - big corporations, androids, body modifications, film noir aesthetic - but does nothing with it. It asks you an interesting philosophical question, but doesn't let the player find their own answer, instead preaching the developer's point of view. You can only change minor things, the outcome will stay the same - which, I suppose, was to be expected from the start, but nevertheless left me very frustrated, because the game clearly tries to sell its weak finale as something deep and philosophical. If you're just looking for an atmospheric game to kill several hours with, The Red Strings Club would do, but for me, its uninspiring story and the player's inability to influence it in a meaningful way pretty much killed all the enjoyment.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 6, 2021

  Never a game had me hooked so early like this one. Its philosophical matters are deep, the narrative understands that nothing is black or white and its multiple choice-driven scenarios emphasizes that. It makes me fear technology and I love it.