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Interrogation
A noir mature game in which you play the role of a detective. You will need to emotionally manipulate suspects, make hard decisions and carefully manage the grand investigation against a mysterious terrorist organization.
VOTING RESULTS
PITCH
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.
Follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/critiquegaming/
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?
What
features would you like to see in the game?
Which
element of the game most raised your interest?
Does this page make you want to support our future Kickstarter?
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.
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UPDATES
STUDIO
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Andrei “Dexter” Olaru is the captain of Critique Gaming. An economist, a security expert, a trainer and a career debater with international results, he’s the entrepreneurial spirit of the team, handling project and team management, wrangling needed resources.
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Marius Petcu has a BA in Computer Science from the Bucharest Polytechnic. With artistic spirit and a background in debating, he’s the team’s programmer. He makes sure the abstract thoughts and ideas of the team take tangible form, supple and interactive on the player’s screen.
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Yanna Zosmer is a graduate of the National University of Arts, a professional illustrator, a great cat lover and a hair-color metamorph. She gives identity and visual form to all of the team’s creative content.
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David Moscovici has a master’s degree in law, is grumpy, is a trainer and career debater and is the team’s game designer. He writes the narrative content, insures the balance and dynamics of game mechanics and handles the creative direction of the games.
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Dragos “Dexi” Antoniu is an economist but his soul is in music. Passionate about contemporary popular art, he creates the sounds and soundtracks for Critique Gaming.
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Completing our art team, Mădălina Șoimu is a Computer Science student. She has a knack for smart video games and for drawing art for them.
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Mihai Oprea, studies law in Bucharest and identifies as a life-long literature lover. With significant experience in table-top RPG design, Mihai works as a writer and narrative designer at Critique Gaming.
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Amateur musician and video game enthusiast, Catalin Nedelus hates waking up early. However, when it comes to game development he is like fish in the water.
So far, this sounds like a great game to me. I think my favorite part of this pitch is the strong focus on interrogation; I love that there's a wide variety of dialogue options to choose from. I also like the idea of having to profile the characters and figure out the best approach by analyzing their fears, desires, etc. I think that is a very interesting aspect of the gameplay. It's a feature that truly makes you think and consider options carefully. I think the art style is great as well; it really fits with the noir style of the game, and it's a unique style that isn't used too often. As someone who doesn't have access to a computer, I also appreciate that there are already plans to release it for mobile and console in the future. Overall, this seems like a very unique, interesting game to me, and it's definitely one I would consider supporting.