The Red Strings Club Review (Switch) – ghost in the machine

The Red Strings Club is a fantastic little point and click adventure game by Devolver Digital that can be completed in one sitting. Running about three to four hours long but with great replay value, The Red Strings Club provides a quality, succinct cyberpunk package fortified with superb dialogue and sprinkled with the tendency to make your question your own opinions.

Much of the game focuses on Damian’s perspective, a bartender and information broker supernaturally tethered to his bar, The Red Strings Club. Damian is known for mixing the best drinks in the city and the way you mix them affects the mood or psychology of the drinker. This can make is easier or harder for you to tease information out of your fruits basket of intriguing patrons.

The other major perspective is that of Damian’s boyfriend, Brandeis, who is a cyber sleuth with all kinds of neat tools and tricks that allow for some clever logic puzzles later in the story. LGBTQ is treated as noralized in the cyberpunk society of The Red Strings Club, which is great!

The Red Strings Clubs loves to pose philosophical questions about the ethics of AI and the limits of brain augmentation. What makes someone really human or not? At what point do we stop being human after changing our bodies? How far is too far when it comes to cybernetic augmentation and the ability of outside parties to affect the human mind with technology?

It’s hard to talk about The Red Strings Club without spoiling everything important, because the bulk of the game is all story. The Red Strings Clubs has fantastic dialogue based puzzles and excellent, naturalistic writing across the board. The ending stays mostly the same, but the getting there can change drastically in very interesting ways depending on the choices you make. I instantly wanted to start over to check out the other story branches.

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Earning an 8/10 from me, The Red Strings Club is a game I would highly suggest giving a try, especially if you are a cyberpunk fan in general or liked other cyberpunk titles like Read Only Memories 2048.

Thanks for reading!

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