Game details Developer: Deconstructeam

Publisher: Devolver Digital

Platform: Windows (reviewed), Mac, Linux

Release Date: January 22, 2018

Price: $15

Links: Steam | Official website Deconstructeam: Devolver Digital: Windows (reviewed), Mac, LinuxJanuary 22, 2018: $15

Cyberpunk might just be the most easily misused genre in history. Those clichéd neon-lit, smog-choked, rainy cities are evocative enough to attract creators less interested in the moral messages of the subject matter like minnows to an anglerfish. Everybody wants their speculative fiction to look like Blade Runner or evoke the ‘80s cool of Neuromancer. But very few address the power dynamics that turned those rainy megalopolises into sad, smog-choked dystopias.

The Red Strings Club is endlessly interested in who does and doesn’t wield society’s power—and what they should do about that. It flits from a corporate high rise literally towering over a fragile populace to the titular Red Strings Club bar, where social lubricants and social engineering pull the metaphorical strings of tech executives. We see people subtly manipulated and outright killed for knowing too much. And it’s all in service of asking, as well as answering, what makes a successful society.

The narrative adventure/bartending simulator isn’t always subtle in pursuing those themes—not that it can always afford to be, given its tight run time of three hours or so. Subtle or not, though, the game blessedly has more to say about its source material than “neon makes great backlighting.”

Things kick off in medias res, with one of your main playable characters bloody and plummeting to his death outside a skyscraper. But the real action begins at the club itself, where a busted android stumbles off the street and into the lives of our two heroes, Brandeis and Donovan. The computer hacking and bartending power-couple uses the bot to learn about a corporate conspiracy of infectious mind control. Utterly lacking the power to stop such a massive existential threat, they set out to do just that.

It’s pretty core cyberpunk stuff. The powers that be aren’t content with control of the freedoms that the general population has given up willingly—like privacy or mastery over their bodies. Nope, the suits want to take over the populace’s minds, by force if necessary. It turns out that’s one step too far for our protagonists, pushing them to fight back in any way they can.

Messy mixology

Unlike most cyberpunk tales, most of Red Strings Club isn’t told from the hacker’s perspective. Instead you control his partner Donovan—a bartender with possibly supernatural powers of observation (there’s a bit of seemingly paranormal activity in the game, but it’s never fully explained). He can read the emotions of his clientele, which lets him serve the perfect drinks to stimulate certain emotions.























So besides choosing dialogue options (and a couple other manual minigames) most of the interactive elements of The Red Strings Club involve cocktails. Do you want to bring out a marketer’s depressive side? Something with vodka will do the trick. Want to hear a scientist blab about his latest project? You’d better serve something to play up his vanity.

The act of mixing drinks does get tedious. You use the mouse to raise and tilt the bottles, pouring the liquid in real-time. And just like with real alcohol, you have to avoid adding too much of one ingredient. Mercifully, there’s no punishment for screwing up; mis-mixed cocktails can be dumped at will. But I suspect a digital button press, like in the similarly cyberpunk bartender sim VA-11 Hall-A, would work just as well as The Red Strings Club’s analog method—without the frustrating need to be so precise.

The actual bartending isn’t the draw, though. What makes the game really interesting are the fascinating, alcohol-fueled debates between Donovan and his customers. Technology should have absolved their citizens from worrying about gender, race, and sexuality in this futuristic world—after all, what does it even mean for the primary protagonists to be queer when you can have cybernetic genitalia? Yet from the bar-top conversations we glean that classic bigotry is alive and well in updated forms. What good is all this technology if you can’t use it to wipe xenophobia and homophobia from people’s brains?

Is that a slippery slope? Who gets to decide what’s worth keeping and erasing? Does humanity need strife to produce beauty? If so, how much? The bar itself feels like a kind of zero judgment zone, where the marginalized and merely interested (including the player) can discuss these questions in safety.

The grand game

But outside of the bar’s (possibly haunted?) walls, we get snapshots of these ideas in play. In fact, most of the strings I pulled as Donovan had gameplay and story-relevant consequences when it was time for people to act on these philosophies in the game’s climax.

Depending on those conversations, I could see The Red Strings Club ending with some very different narrative and emotional outcomes. And it’s just short and well-paced enough to make me want to power through the tedious drink mixing to see what might have happened if I hadn’t complimented that android, if I had gotten more info out of that marketer, or if I had told that lawyer more about the woman we were investigating.

At the same time, I’m happy with the way my tragic little story played out. I answered The Red Strings Club’s existential questions as best I could, and I don’t know that I’d be fully comfortable making different choices. Meanwhile the rain and neon, rather than being the focus, only enhanced the mood around them. To me, those are the hallmarks of a good mix between cyberpunk and adventure-game genres in one short, bittersweet package.

The good:

A cyberpunk art style that serves the setting, rather than defines it.

Fascinating conversations with a diverse band of characters.

Minigames break up the chitchat for some good, brisk pacing.

The bad:

Mixing drinks is a novel mechanic, but it wears out its welcome.

The ugly:

I can’t decide if I want to see where other choices lead me, or simply leave it be.

Verdict: It’s a great game to fill a contemplative afternoon. Buy it.