Review for The Red Strings Club. PC game, the video game came out on 01/01/1970
The Red Strings Club, last title of the Spanish team Deconstructeam, is a real revelation: with an exquisite retro air of 90s graphic adventure, the game immediately offers us an atypical gameplay for the genre and an exciting and well-structured story, which we will have to guide and develop, with unpredictable effects, through the actions and choices of the protagonists.
The Red Strings Club is a bar with a melancholy vintage atmosphere, managed by Donovan, a bartender who possesses the innate ability to read the soul of customers thanks to his cocktails (yes, thanks to those) and by his fellow pianist, with the addition of cybernetic systems.
Yes, because, despite the atmosphere, The Red Strings Club is set in a cyberpunk future, in a huge and sprawling city, dominated by almost omnipotent and unscrupulous corporations. If the setting is classic, the way to deal with it is certainly not. In fact, we will have to evolve the plot thanks to Donovan's special ability, which makes him a very precious informant, stealing useful information from customers. This information can then be used to the detriment of Supercontinent LTD, a ruthless corporation whose specialty lies in marketing systems for controlling emotions. In all this they will help us in addition to comrade Brandis, also the android Akara 184, originally assigned to the realization of these particular systems.
In the plot, broadly speaking, a similarity with the themes treated by Dick in his stories is clearly recognized, but it is the way of dealing with them that has left us pleasantly surprised. It must be said that The Red Strings Club, even if it owns the structure, is not the classic graphic adventure. A lot (a lot) of time we will spend reading detailed descriptions and dialogues, almost like in a graphic novel or an old text adventure. For this reason, the lack of translation of the text into Spanish could represent a serious difficulty for those who do not know English well since many nuances, even slight ones, still have a certain weight.
In addition to the graphics, composed of a very refined pixel art, and the refined sound and atmosphere, among its strengths The Red Strings Club can count on some gameplay foundations, such as creating different types of cocktails that touch certain aspects of the customer's soul, truly brilliant. Too bad that these originalities tend to flatten out in the second part of the adventure.
Ultimately, The Red Strings Club turns out to be an excellent title, with a lot of interesting ideas and situations that “revisit” the classic cyberpunk vein in another light. The themes, however, may not appeal to a distracted player or not very interested in the genre. This, together with the lack of localization, make The Red String Club suitable, to use a now famous term, for many but not all.
The Red Strings Club is available on Steam.
► The Red Strings Club is a Graphic Adventure-Puzzle game developed by Deconstructeam and published by Devolver Digital for PC, the video game was released on 01/01/1970
