Crime fighting meets roguelike in Gilded Rune Games’ new release Dupery: A Game of Solo Deduction. Currently available on Steam, Dupery: A Game of Solo Deduction puts players in the position of an investigator who has to solve various cases over a number of different locations. There’s a lot to get to grips with from the get go with this game but is it worth it?
These criminals aren’t going to dupe me.
Gameplay
The premise of Dupery is pretty simple. There’s a grid that features a crime scene – and occasionally other suspect specific locations – and a bunch of suspects. It’s up to the player to decide whether a suspect is innocent, a meddler, a member of the syndicate or a traitor. Each suspect type gives the player different information to help you arrest all the bad guys.
Dupery gets really overwhelming really quickly. Even though you have to play through a tutorial when you start a new save, it doesn’t explain everything well. It talks you through the very basics of the game and then releases you into the wild. Obviously the game can’t talk you through ever suspect type and hold your hand. That being said, Dupery goes from 0-100 real quick and for a while it felt like I was always on the back foot.
Even with a long list of suspects in play, along with an explanation of what they each did, it took a while for me to fully wrap my head around each of the suspects. Then, of course, once I managed that, more suspect types were added to the files.
I’d have arrested the right guy if it wasn’t for you meddlers!
There are four types of suspect in Dupery. You have innocents who are… innocent. Then you have Underlings who are the big bad guys. Underlings are characters like the Serial Killer who can kill adjacent innocents or the Conman who can pretend to be an innocent bystander and give you wrong information. After that, there’s the Meddlers. These guys aren’t evil and you actually lose post for arresting but they love to get in the way. Finally, there’s the Tricksters. The game calls these pure evil. They exist purely to get you fired and can alter the game really quickly. One of the most intense is the hitman who will just start killing people for funsies.
As mentioned, Dupery does try to help by giving you a list of characters that might be active. However, it’s still a lot to put together before you can confidently make any deductions.
Oh you thought lying was bad? Well I’m a good guy and I can lie.
As you work through cases, you’ll unlock the ‘tainted’ debuiff. This is a debuff that applies to innocents on the board typically by meddlers but it can also be applied by underlings. Essentially, when this is applied to suspects they will start to lie to you whilst keeping their innocent title. No longer is it just about good vs evil, you need to work a little bit harder to uncover the real bad guys. Players can keep track of whether someone is good or bad without making arrests by using the in-game pins and pen to draw all over the board as you complete your deductions.
This is a really good addition to Dupery. It adds a little bit more difficulty whilst making it feel like an even greater accomplishment when you arrest all the right people and guess the tainted characters correctly.
Nah all of these guys are definitely innocent
As is the way with roguelike games, once you complete a round of investigating, you get to unlock a buff. Unlike typical roguelikes where you unlock additonal power or punch things a bit harder, in Dupery you get to twist the board to your advantage. Post-investigation power ups include regaining some of your lost reputation, deciding what type of actions the traitors have and choosing exactly which suspects can show up in your investigation each round. For example, I quite like the hitman traitor and there is an unlock which makes him only shoot innocents. It seems counter productive but boy does it quickly narrow down the suspect pile.
Once you reach the end of a case, you unlock additional suspects and increase a tier which raises the difficulty.
Graphics & Audio
The art style of Dupery is exactly what you would expect from a noir crime game. The suspect cards are easy to differentiate and leave little room to be confusing visually. Even the post-run stats fit in perfectly with the genre and style of the gane. It’s the same story for the audio which perfectly encapsulates the vibes on what a game of this style should sound like. Thankfully they aren’t overwhelming or distracting enough that it takes your focus away from the game. You could easily play Dupery whilst listening to your own music if you want to but you would definitely be missing out on a fun little experience.
Longevity
There is plenty of playtime available in Dupery. With multiple tiers and multiple locations to play across, it’s going to be difficult to run out of rounds to play. Each round is procedurely generated meaning the likelihood of playing the exact same scenario more than once is slim. As with many roguelikes, Dupery has this knack of making you so frustrated when you do it wrong that you just have to keep playing to get it right. Usually when games take a lot of brain power, I find it really easy to just give up and not try to learn the mechanics and the roles. In contrast, I never once felt like giving up. It makes you want to be right even when it feels massively convoluted. I will definitely be going back to Dupery to try and complete every case in every location.
Final Thoughts
Dupery is a really cool take on the roguelike genre which I, personally, have never seen before. Even though it was really difficult and made me feel a little bit stupid I really did enjoy every moment of the game. Dupery easily deserves the Thumb Culture Gold Awards. Gilded Runes Games have done it again with this new game launch. If you’re a fan of puzzle games and love the repetitive nature of roguelikes then you should definitely add Dupery to your library!
Disclaimer: A code was received in order to write this review.
If you want to see me waffle about other games, you can check out my other reviews here!
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