Song of Farca

I really like this game but it has some issues, a few logic leaps, and some bad english/typos in some places. It is a short game, but was actually longer than I thought, and has multiple endings. That said having to redo stuff is going to be slow/slower without a proper save system, though you do get a chapter select which helps with collectibles. A lot of the hacking stuff doesn't *really* make sense either, but that's fine. Some time waiting wasting and stuff, and repeating sequences is *really* annoying if you didn't do something right the first time (and some pictures are small enough that you can easily miss if you have a problems with that sort of thing.) Music drops out sometimes, and some alerts don't clear properly. I can understand why people don't like the ending but I think the [spoilers] in one ending is interesting considering it can be interpreted two ways. Some of the stuff in world doesn't make much sense. The worst bit is probably some of the design; you can loop some annoying sounds on some places accidentally, and some placement of stuff is unknowable until you hit it and get annoying sound effect. There's also a *really* pointless pronoun piece in the game. I kept waiting for it to come into play and it never does, it's literally just a useless data point, which is annoying. All that said I loved the game. Like the art, loved the story for the most part. Music is servicable, and has a few *REALLY* good moments.

You don't understand. There isn't another game like this. You'll be on the edge of your seat, leaning close to your monitor, you'll be seriously emotionally invested. The game is FUN. I finished it in two days, and it feels more like I was a part of a seriously fucked up interactive 3 hour AAA Hollywood film where my actions had consequences - not silly video game consequences, REAL consequences. You will love this game. Seriously.

This is an adventure game in the skin of a Cyberpunk hacking sim. Your hacker character is under house arrest, take on hacking jobs. This mainly consists of opening up surveillance maps of areas, then activating remote objects on the scene to complete your goal. Stuff like discovering the security camera that has the right angle you need, but access to it is blocked by door, so you hack into a cleaning bot and have it knock over a trashcan to cause a guard to investigate the noise by opening the door. Stuff like that. These puzzles aren't heady, but they flow fine as long as you're signing up for an adventure game and not hardcore hacking sim. You start off tracking down a lost dog. Missions escalate. The coolest is when a group of mercs pull a traditional Shadowrun style raid on a corporate HQ, and you're their remote hacker support, disabling security and giving directions as they fend off guards. The problem is the rest of the game. The protagonist is very unlikeable. She's not someone caught in a bad situation. She's just a selfish a-hole. It's hard to tell how much is her and how much is the writer's weird social views. One "mission" is trying to find the perfect birthday present for your girlfriend. This would be a cute mission, except you're hacking into all her personal info and violating her privacy to do so. The game presents this as romantic? Either you're supposed to be playing a complete sociopath, or the writer actually thought this was a precious moment. The puzzles that aren't locations are dialog trees. This is by far the worst part of the game. They highlight just how unlikeable the protagonist is. The dialog is a puzzle itself, usually in the form of convincing a hostile person to cooperate. Often there is little logic or clues on what responses work. You're just trying every combo of responses until one works, and usually there's no good reason why that one worked and the others didn't. An okay lite puzzle Cyberpunk sim, some drag writing.

My first completed game in 2024 is Song of Farca, an investigation game in a believable cyberpunk setting. You play as a private investigator under home arrest, so you need to rely fully on you hacking and deducing skills, with no direct access to the scenes you are investigating. Political comment is obviously to be expected: this is cyberpunk, not neon-capitalism. I was not expecting to complete a game that early this year (I struggle to find time to play, and seldom play more than 2~3 games through completion every year), so this is a real nice surprise. It even left me wanting for more cyberpunk investigation. As usual with games I recommend, there is a legit DRM-free build available. Don’t send your money to Steam. — https://www.alawar.com/en/games/song-of-farca/

In Song of Farce you play a private investigator under house arrest who consequently has to solve cases using cameras and drones at remote sitse respectively phone calls. Gameplay wise it’s a collection of mini-games, light puzzles and dialog driven adventure. What makes it stand out from other, technically similar games is the story and the characters. The action unfolds on a small city state island where your cases make you meet pop stars, rich heirs, underground kingpins, the local police and others. They all have in common (including yourself) to have “gray” personalities with good parts and bad parts that make them suitable both as enemies and allies. And actually the story throws several of them into both position depending on the case and your decisions. So prepare yourself for having to make some morally ambiguous decisions. And while there are multiple endings, don’t expect one where it's all rainbows, glitter and ponies. On the negative side, I had a few occasions where I had to restart a room because the game died not register me picking up an essential item. In total, I lost less than 20 minutes because of this. Some of the numeric code puzzles were to silly for me, so I just looked them up online. And I figured out only very late in the game how to collect collectibles, which I didn’t really care about anyway. But this are minor issues compared to my overall enjoyment of the game, so consider this review a 4.7 instead of 5.0.