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 Buy from UK eShop Buy from US eShop GNOSIA (Petit Depotto, 2019) is Werewolf, and also Coup, and and also Groundhog Day, and also a visual novel? Also I guess it isn't really entirely any of those things. It's an odd one. But, mostly, it really is Werewolf, with a plot and cast. (It was originally released in Japan in 2019 on the Vita, and since been ported to Switch and localised.) The mysterious, malevolent and deadly Gnosia have infiltrated your starship crew, and will straight up delete one human from existence every night until either they outnumber the humans or have all been voted into cold sleep. The crew can avail of special roles that can unearth key knowledge to help identify the impostors among them, and the Gnosia can fake those roles and mislead the crew. And then, when everyone is saved, or doomed, time loops, and you do it all again, with the same characters in new roles. You might even be Gnosia yourself.  Rather than this being a real time game you play with real people, Gnosia drops you in with 14 AI controlled NPCs, who each have their own personality which remains consistent throughout loops, which together with their assigned role will inform their actions. Raqio excels at logic and will put fakers dead to rights, but as Gnosia they'll lie so plausibly you'll swear they're the real engineer. SQ is charismatic and social and can unite the crew against an opponent, but as Gnosia she's so charming nobody can bring themselves to vote her out. Sha-Ming is a subtle manipulator able to level accusations without putting a target on his back, but as Gnosia he'll fade so completely into the background you won't even think to suspect him. And so on. As you loop, you'll learn how these people think and act, and that, as much as levelling up your own character, is how you'll learn to win every time. Or, just trying again. You've got as many tries as it takes.  At its heart Gnosia is an RPG. Its battles come in the form of debates, where the crew will spend five rounds accusing eachother of being Gnosia, or vouching for eachother, or presenting their special knowledge, or lying through their teeth. You can listen and react to other people's statements (safer, but reactive), or try to lead the discussion (lets you direct things, but draws attention to you). Each character's like and trust of each other character and each character's actual and perceived actions are tracked by the game and fluctuate each time an action is taken, and the success and impact of actions is calculated according to six core stats: Charisma helps you sway others with your accusations and defences, Charm, conversely, helps you defeat others' attempts to turn the crew against you, Logic gives you more sway when arguing from evidence, Intuition gives you a chance to detect when others are lying, Performance, conversely, makes it less likely your own lies will be detected, Stealth makes others suspect you less, and the Gnosia less likely to kill you. In addition, you can learn a variety of Skills by befriending the cast across loops, which allow you do interesting things like make more emotive appeals (which are more effective, but draw more attention), lay out a logical case for someone being Gnosia (which will result in a slam dunk vote if done right, but draws the Gnosia's ire), or prompt everyone in the room to say "I'm human!" in the hopes that someone's Intuition might proc (which might work, but might also cause everybody to get sick of your bullshit). Gnosia's cast debates in stock phrases and won't exactly ace any Turing Tests but the game does organically react to logical thought. For example, if one character (correctly) casts doubt on a Gnosia, and then disappears that night, a character with a high Logic score might, instead of their stock aspersion cast, actually cite a basis for their suspicion when smashing that Doubt button. On top of that, Gnosia very granularly tracks what is and isn't a lie based on what you know, and encourages you to try and make deductions sometimes (it even has an in-game FAQ which lays out various logical traps you can try and catch people in, and also tabulates everything everyone has said as you play so you don't have to remember everything).  And you'd better get to grips with it, because you're gonna be juggling a lot of poo poo once you get a few loops in. Here's how the game works. You loop into a crew of up to 15, which can contain up to 6 Gnosia and a certain combination of special roles. Each day, the whole crew will hear arguments, and then vote someone into cold sleep (and there's procedures for ties, don't you worry). Then, each night, if there's still Gnosia up and about, the Gnosia will choose a human who will die. This repeats until either all the Gnosia are in cold sleep, or they outnumber the remaining humans. These are the roles, which are all (other than Human or Gnosia) toggleable and known during the game, so you always know how many Gnosia there are and whether or not there's an Engineer, etc:
The game starts you off in a few scripted loops that introduce the procedures and the roles, and gradually hands you the ability to customise the paramaters of each loop, so you can choose to play with a crew of 10 with 2 Gnosia, a Doctor but no Engineer, no AC Follower, and a Bug, and you're the Bug. There's a plot, though, and to see that you'll have to trigger events that are typically contingent on certain characters being certain roles. You never know what these are, but the game gives you a button that will configure the next loop in a way that might lead to a new event.   I think I love this game? I'm not even done with it yet, it's just so drat neat. Fedule fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Apr 6, 2021 |
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Apr 5, 2021 02:09
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| # ? Apr 29, 2024 20:06 |
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I've been informed there actually was a Gnosia thread already, and it just wasn't in the Games index thread for whatever reason? Oh well. RIP this thread.
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Apr 5, 2021 02:23
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