Psycho Patrol R

[one-armed dwarf]

Broke my gaming fast with some jankcore immersive sim. This is a weird game, it's a Soulslike immersive sim. Why don't we have more of those? It's like the most obviously great idea in the world alongside first person survival horror. Like Cruelty Squad it's very postmodern and feels like a 4chan shitpost but critically the game doesn't feel like it's just being stupid and random with how ironic it is all the time. You're either into this type of thing or you find it unbearable, this is why Steam has a 2 hour refund window.

 

 

It's a bit Deus Ex in its setup, you're in a HQ and your handler sets you off on a mission to investigate carcinogenic shampoo or something. I'm not going to attempt to explain the story part cause it's very dense in strange lingos and terminology, which is where it gets a bit Soulslike cause its story and world feels a bit broken and hard to understand. But it's also soulslike in that Euros are your souls for upgrading, and you can pick them up on death or lose them forever. I tried a recruit first and got really fucked up with debt, started over as a detective who can seem to do things like look at the company intranet but it shows you a bunch of hexadecimal and I've no idea what to do with it. Nothing in the game is explained, you have stats like Vitality and Perception and Luck, you also have Bioenergy and 'Lack'. You sort of have to stumble your way through and figure it out via context, I suppose. NPCs can help you out with that and if you bribe them they can tell you things about the state of the world, politics, cocaine task forces, celibacy, energy drinks and investment opportunities, the last of which is very important cause if you don't have a diverse portfolio you will lose money every single day. You want to get time in the market quick, NPCs will help you there. They also give you sidequests which give you more things to do

 

Outside of the NPC stuff, it turns into Deus Ex meets Armored Core. You have a big mech which you can upgrade and change the properties of. It's not as in depth as AC or anything like that but it is very difficult and you can't just yolo it. In terms of how to infiltrate combat areas I've just not figured it out yet, I'm still at the 'accumulating knowledge' part of all of this. One thing I did figure out is how to kick in my next door neighbour's apartment and murder him for a cool 15Gs, but then I got killed after only spending some of it and didn't recover it quickly

 

It's early access so the purposeful jank is going to also have a lot of accidental development jank

 

I swear I'm not trying to big up a strange game to seem cool, I do like immersive sims a lot and this seems to go really hard in a way I've not being able to find with a game for a while. It seems super crunchy, both in its systems and in how it looks. I expect this thing to bubble into a really weird cult thing this year, off the back of Cruelty Squad being that already but I think this will be more interesting to people cause of the RPG elements

[one-armed dwarf]

I've made a bit more headway, maybe I can more coherently explain this thing. The story is you're in this world living under some form of martial law, part of this group called the European Federal Police, which are like a weird version of UNATCO in Deus Ex I suppose. They have carved out their world view according to the designs of this philosopher who wrote books on Fascism but also some really weird stuff called orgone energy, which seems like it might become a gameplay mechanic.

 

https://www.polygon.com/impressions/549723/psycho-patrol-r-cyberpunk-immersive-sim-mech-shooter

 

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/psycho-patrol-r-overview-guide/

 

As one of these cops you have a lot of latitude to do whatever the fuck you want, which is a good base to build an immersive sim off of. You're 'ethically flexible' as an in-game NPC puts it, so a lot of the sidequests disputes so far have boiled down to killing one NPC or the other. Some merc stole another guy's dog, do you want to kill the dog thief or the owner? You get different rewards for each and the game indicates that you might meet one of these NPCs later on so you should choose carefully (I sided with the merc, will see how that goes).

 

The game gets way more immersive sim in this one quest I have, where you have to infiltrate a mansion of a former bureaucrat who might have had a hand in a few human rights crimes and his anime nerd son. You can go underneath the mansion via the sewers, buy a key in the front door from the former gardener or, I think, use a rope gun to go in the top though I haven't actually figured out how this works yet, I just know it's possible. So proper Deus Ex style stuff. I just went in the door and started blasting, the early access deletes your saves each update so I have plenty of time to consider a more brainy approach in a future run. Right now it's just practice

 

You have this massive computer system in the game. Stock investments, a journal log, a database on every NPC you have met, where they are and your thoughts on them and you can track them on this. You can also see bounties on some NPCs if they are tax dodgers, so you can exercise your moral authority to liquidate them (literally). I don't know where you claim the bounties though. You also have an in-game version of twitter where you can go in people's DMs and type mad shit at them but I don't know if this actually does anything. Some aspects of this might not be finished yet so who knows what it turns into in the full release

 

 

The reason you want to invest in the stock market is ammo costs money, like Armored Core. So you want to be accurate (perception stat helps) and have a diverse portfolio so you have a steady income. There's a huge advantage to either siding with rich people or murdering them, I don't know if the quests really ripple through the game but at least you can look at their bank balance and think of using it to buy stuff and level up. Which, on that, they only tell you what strength and vitality do. Stuff like Bioenergy and Lack you have to figure out by looking at your stats as they change

 

The fatigue mechanic seems overbearing at first but it's weirdly easy to manage. It's moreso designed to avoid you messing around with the stock market I think by sleeping every day. You can keep your fatigue at bay with cigarettes and energy drinks, so now I do most of my missions while smoking

 

On its difficulty, you are very fragile in this game. I was reading some reddit posts complaining about how you can step out in a certain direction and get one shot by things you can't see, which is a thing. But I feel it's less an EA jank balance issue and more just the idea. You have to prepare before venturing forth, the world outside is dangerous in the way that it can be in some eurojank RPG like Gothic so you should get a helmet or stay in your mech which is invincible to NPCs (but not other mechs, critically). It's a problem solved by carefully paying attention to the game systems and learning through trial and error. I do think tho they need to better indicate friendly NPCs from hostile cause it's impossible to know right now

 

Last thing to figure out is what orgone energy actually does I think, cause my build is specced for it but I've no idea how to use it1

[one-armed dwarf]

The mech combat is crazy hard. I've sort of learned that buying equipment and mech parts is more important than leveling up and in fact I suspect you could complete the game without leveling

 

I've struggled with money and what I'm trying to do now is to dump it all in the stock market, so I don't lose it as easily and not to just spend it all on upgrades when I get a payday. Is this some sort of commentary or something I dunno. I did kill a guy for a bank cause he was in arrears on his mortgage, except he didn't have a mortgage at all cause he couldn't get approved even tho his rent payments were higher than the mortgage he applied for. When he died he dropped 25 cups of espresso and some bags of cocaine as loot. Environmental storytelling, he's really bad at the economy I think and should kick his habits. Well I helped him there.

 

The level design is the worst part of this game I think. It was actually really good in Cruelty Squad once you looked behind the facade of its deep fried aesthetic. Lots of spots to infiltrate and ways to do things. This replaces that depth in deep level design with breadth in systems. That's the thing I like most about it. It's a figuring out game, if you are satisfied by the feeling of learning how systems work and interlock then this is a game about that which is part of the Dark Souls-ness of it a bit. Like the mechs where you have to spend ages studying ballistics (the game doesn't tell you this), like how the weight of projectiles affects the speed at which they dip, the muzzle velocity how fast they reach the target. Then you have to balance that against their stability, their energy consumption and their speed. Armored Core type shit.

 

There's an unfinished roughness to some of it as I go in further and I'd probably not recommend rushing to get it, tho I might be talking into the void on this one anyway. It's not as good at any of the things it's inspired by, AC does all the mech stuff better. Deus Ex 1 does Cyberpunk conspiracy storylines better, and NPC questlines too. Dark Souls does large worlds with fraught encounter design better. But it is really cool how it combines all of these inspirations in such a crunchy and inspired way and doesn't give a fuck about who it doesn't appeal to

[one-armed dwarf]

Completed the EA. The later bits in the game feel a bit barren and experimental. It sort of feels like it's throwing a bunch of things together and is not quite sure where it wants to take them yet. I read on the discussions on steam that apparently the idea is to release 1.0 in about a year and I think it would need that much time to really bring some of its subsystems in sync with each other and give the narrative more of a flow, cause the world is super interesting in its own way but it's all very loose right now in terms of how it plays and what it's saying, which isn't anywhere as coherent as Cruelty Squad which feels more relevant than ever. I'd say the HQ and the residential area just after it are the two parts which feel complete right now and everything else is cobbled together. There's an area with apartments at war with each other and a bank that are near complete maybe, I didn't unlock the high level investment option in the bank tho so maybe there's more to that I missed.

 

The last section is a big blighttown style swamp where you fight against limited visibility, and can use it to your advantage. Then it's a base where you die a lot. It had some interesting level design but was mostly a shooting gallery, which is the thing that needs improvement most I think. Let me explore other ways than turning people into red paste

 

Potential GOTY 2026 maybe, up until I started to lose interest tho I was completely absorbed. Just needs more meat in the later game. That's early access for you tho. Motivated to actually beat Cruelty Squad now tho, after a palette cleanser anyway

 

Took around 25 hours, read some people did it in like half that time.