Song of Farca

This game is far more dystopian than its colorful and loving art gives it any right to be. It sinks like a knot of unease into your stomach and festers there as you shovel regrets upon semi-hollow victories to moody electronic music. It never rains. In the end it crushes you in unempathetic pragmatism that will leave you satisfyingly unsatisfied and depressed. This cyberpunk is the real deal, and I hate it, but I also love it.

Song of Farca is an adventure game in a cyberpunk setting. The story follows a private investigator, Isabella Song, under house arrest in the city of Farca as the tensions between the citizens and the corporations are rising. The main character’s personality and manner of speech are predetermined, and might be off-putting. She, a gay cis immigrant woman, uses homophobic slurs, casually threatens, blackmails, and sends a random person to prison without conclusive evidence. Additionally, the police are presented as well-meaning but powerless, while the protesters are universally sociopathic. Finally, the game briefly raises the topic of domestic violence without offering a resolution or providing agency to the survivor. On the other hand, the setting itself features a diverse cast of characters, though it was hard to notice differences in the manner of speech, and the dialogues are not voiced. As typical for adventure games, many dialogues are linear or the options are meaningless, making some of the story-significant choices hard to notice. The game structure is comfortable - the cases are clearly separated and mostly self-contained. There are several types of puzzles - finding the information in a location from a top-down view, with all interactive objects, clues, and characters clearly marked and dialogue-based "conclusions" - combining two pieces of information into an argument to convince an NPC. At the beginning, there are no direct penalties for failing and retrying puzzles or time limits, but from mid-game and onward failing some of the puzzles affects the story, and it is not clearly communicated which of them allow retries. There are no hotkeys, the game uses auto-saves, it is impossible to skip cutscenes, actual choices and consequences are unmarked. On a positive note, the objective and the number of clues to discover is shown and it is possible to reset a location to its original state. Also there are several hints for the puzzles.

I started out really not liking the main character of Izzy. She just got on my nerves being an idealistic idiot who criticizes people for things she does herself. There were no dialogue options available that made her more likeable to me. This started to change a little as the game went on and by the last chapter I’d say I had really made her into something I could be happy with. The last few missions of the game was simply fantastic from a story standpoint including some great twists. That is despite me not liking any of the endings very much. I will also say some of the politics of the story seem forced and shoehorned in to make it seem relevant to real world issues without seeming genuine in the game world. Luckily the game play was pretty decent which made me ride out the early issues I had to make it through and see the game mature and grow. There were a lot of goods characters and the game blended humour and drama well. It also had a great cyberpunk type of atmosphere as well as having some good lore built up for the city and it’s history. There is a good amount of variety to the game in terms of mechanics. You have to use drones; bots; hack cameras; all in order to navigate levels and achieve various goals. You also have to know how and when to use pieces of evidence in order to advance conversations and gather more clues. This part was hit and miss as I found some times it felt like the answer was logical and others it felt like trying everything until you found the right combo of items or dialogue regardless of whether it made sense. You also have to figure out navigating vents as well as avoid people or make them go where you need them to in order to access things they were guarding. The game play was pretty intuitive and while simple to figure out there were some decently complex puzzles to solve. One mechanic I didn’t like was the passwords. The first few were straightforward but after that it seemed to become more and more of a chore.

Is Song of Farca a good game? Yes. But only on your first playthrough. It's a a beefed-up visual novel with a nice, trivial hacking minigame, a conversation system in which you have to present evidence created by your deductions and a simple but effective pixel art depiction of your home. It will give you about 8-9 hours of intrigue and good gameplay...and then 30 more hours of boredom if you try to get all the achievements: you can't skip any dialogue. The first playthrough is “the good one” and that the game is not as replayable as the developers think. Why am I giving it a bad rating? Because it's Russian copaganda in disguise. It's set in Farca, a fictional nation that looks like your generic cyberpunk dystopia. Your character, a blue-haired, tattooed and pierced lesbian (or bi?) girl with a video game t-shirt, is in house arrest, but it’s not because she’s oppressed: she's a loose cannon who punched someone. She's aided by a leftwing journalist and from time to time you receive a revolutionary newsletter you can reply to, and those replies will shape the world, leading to different world events and achievements. Be revolutionary enough and you’ll get everyone killed. Sounds absurd? Yeah, because it is. You eventually realize antifa characters are psychopaths (one of them a literal serial killer) and the most honorable people are an oligarch/mob boss and a cop. Choices don't matter. No plot twists will ever change. You get the illusion that choices matter because you must play well or your mistakes will get people killed, so there's a "proper" way to play and other options are not choices, but failures, except when you guide a character through a life-threatening situation, but no matter what you do, she won't die, because she will die later to force a plot point on you. It’s all smoke and mirrors. But the game is very playable. The music is subtle, with a touch of Deus Ex. The graphics are nice, with cool character design. It could have been great :(