Interrogation is a noir detective game with RPG elements and a strong narrative backbone. It puts the player in the shoes of an investigator that is leading the fight against a fictional terrorist organization, the powerful Liberation Front.

It follows in the footsteps of games like "Papers' Please" or "This War of Mine", thought-provoking games with innovative gameplay. Interrogation aims at being an immersive narrative experience that will get players thinking by challenging their preconceptions about a number of highly relevant contemporary subjects like terrorism or police brutality. It analyses, without forcing any conclusion, the power dis-balance between citizens, the state and large corporations.

Try to understand your suspects and to manipulate their emotions into getting the information that you want. Make impactful story decisions and deal with the Liberation Front in your own way. Get to know who they are and cast your own judgement of them and their actions.

Interrogation is a mature narrative puzzle game, having players piece together information, study and manipulate the emotional states of their subjects.

Interrogation’s gameplay is carefully constructed so as to illustrate the complexities and challenges of fighting a smart and powerful terrorist organization, such as:

-        the on-the-spot psychological profiling required during a high-stakes interrogation

-        the fast conversational decision making required under time pressure

-        the nuance and tact required for extracting information out of a terrorist

-        the difficult moral choices that have to be made, the boundaries and rules that have to be broken

-        the PR and logistical constraints of a long-term operation against a well-funded charismatic extremist organization

-        the wide array of stakeholders that need to be taken into account (the public, colleagues, the media, terrorist sympathizers, politicians, companies, international organizations and many more)

-        the stress, the guilt, the doubt and the effects of all of these have on one’s mental health.

To that end, we have studied real, current and past terrorist organizations. We’ve looked at the way in which they function and the way in which they were tackled. We studied the tactics employed by professional negotiators and interrogators, the dynamics and constraints of law enforcement and the problems that tend to arise during long-term investigations. So as to create realistic characters that act naturally when being interrogated, we’ve carefully calibrated them according to the psychological makeup and reactions of real people under pressure, guilty and innocent

The game’s gameplay is divided into two phases: 

-        Interrogation scenes in which you are tasked with getting out certain essential pieces of information from different terrorist suspects, sometimes under time pressure

-        The campaign management phase in which you converse with your team and other relevant actors, you review your progress and the perception of other regarding your efforts, you allocate resources and assign tasks

What tools will you employ to face the Liberation Front?

The Liberation Front’s influence is expanding more and more. Analysts are saying that it might be the most powerful terrorist organisation in modern history. At the heart of it, you are the investigator tasked with preventing their attacks and, perhaps, stopping the Liberation Front for good. What do these anarchists want, and how are they so capable?

Rich and poor, left or right leaning, women or men, The Liberation Front filled its ranks with people from all walks of life. They want to dismantle society as we know it and to rebuild it from the ground up. Can you stop them? Will you stop them?

You need to pierce the minds of your suspects and work your way to the truth through intimidation, guile or empathy. You must understand their motivations and make hard choices about your methods. To what lengths are you willing to go to attain your goals?

Beyond each interrogation lies the fight against the Liberation Front. Where do you stand on their demands and their views? Will you engage in all-out war or will you attempt to get close to them? What if you get too close?

Lives are at stake.

The 10 interrogation scenes will be the central part of the game. They simulate real conversations in which players will need to emotionally manipulate the suspects in front of them, as well as correlate information.

Understanding your subject’s backgrounds and their motivations will be key toward choosing whether to approach them through intimidation, guile or empathy. Towards this, the game doesn't hold your hand. We give you options of what questions to ask and we track the way in which they influence the emotions of the suspects. In turn, this will lead to future questions, answers and reactions.

To what lengths are you willing to go to in order to attain your goals… that is your choice.

Outside the interrogation phases, the campaign phases ask you to decide how to allocate resources and perks, as well as to make major story decisions with consequences both immediate as well as reaching into future chapters. Ethics, morality and efficiency are all factors that will need to be balanced. Or not. Your call.

Beating a complex and realistic terrorist organization is no easy task. You need to carefully manage a limited budget, wisely allocate missions to your agents and be cunning in the way in which you talk to the press, politicians or even other members of the police. In Interrogation you need to do all these things and do them well. The Liberation Front will not be easy to dismantle.

All of Interrogation's art and sound is built around tension. The custom music conveys, with increasing tempo, the imminent danger that the player is working against, as well as the serious nature of the challenge. The music tracks of each episode foreshadow the narrative consequences of the player’s performance.

The almost-monochrome art also focuses the action on the narration, pointing to the realistic nuanced personalities of the characters.

Drawing the players into the story is key for us. That is why we carefully hand-draw every animation by rotoscoping over 1000 photos of over 40 actors, some of them with more than 40 years of experience on stage.

The game is designed as a serious intellectual experience, aimed at players that want to engage in interactive digital encounters that are more than just digital toys. That is why the game has been developed as a PC game first, and will first be released on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Also, because people find it easier to immerse themselves in games in vastly different ways, we plan on releasing the game on other platforms as well as time goes by, both consoles and mobile.

Interrogation is being developed by Critique Gaming (critique-gaming.com). We are a new small Bucharest - based studio dedicated to the development of socially responsible video-games. We build pointful, thought-provoking games because we believe that games can be more than just digital toys. Games can be awesome, transformative interactive experiences that give insight, bring catharsis and better our understanding of complex issues.

Please help us by supporting us here with Square Enix Collective and in the future with our crowdfunding.

Sign up to our mailing list at critique-gaming.com/interrogation and be the first to play.

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Also, if you want to help us right now, please answer in the comments below to any of these questions:

What do you think of the game so far?

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Thank you for everything! 

The life of small indie devs is not as tension-filled as that of a top level detective fighting terrorists, and the overall shape of society may not be determined by our performance in our craft. However, this does not mean it is not filled with stress, worries and doubts. It does not mean that we do not face hard choices everyday, that we do not need to take a lot of things into account when developing our product: costs, morale, public perception, player feedback etc.

The Square Enix Collective community could be of great help for us in this challenging quest: releasing a game as novel and as unusual as Interrogation. Your feedback could be crucial in giving us the guidance we need whenever we are unsure of our decisions. Your support could help us pull through hard times. Last, but not least, you could be our saviors in the difficult moments ahead, when our savings may run out and we would stop being able to work on Interrogation. That will happen very soon and crowdfunding could be the solution for us. We know that Square Enix Collective is a great launchpad for a future Kickstarter so here we are, laying the groundwork for that.