The Indie Informer

In Dupery, you play as a run-down detective who is hired to take down a powerful criminal syndicate plaguing the city. I was immediately captivated by the premise of the game within seconds of playing. The black-and-white noir vibe was alluring and quickly put me in the mindset of a 1940’s detective who begrudgingly scoffs at the cases, but secretly needs to solve the cases too. Pair the aesthetics with the moody jazz music and you have a recipe for entrancing melodrama.

The gameplay is focused on social deduction, but in a solo format. Typically, social deduction games are played with several people, oftentimes taking on personas and characteristics with an ultimate goal that all the players aim to achieve. More often than not, the most popular social deduction games typically have the goal of “who’s the murderer?” or “who’s the big bad”, etc. Dupery is no different in that respect, but works wonderfully with the tone of the game.

Originally, I was cautious of the solo-aspect of the game since I have played my fair share of in-person social deduction games over the years. The fun of them often comes from the off-the-cuff shenanigan’s of leaning into the theatrics of the story with friends. The personalities of the people you’re playing with can typically make the game and the experience unique and varied each time. Happily, Gilded Rune Games, wonderfully translated the logistics of the gameplay mechanics into a solo game that quickly caught my attention.

Once the opening credits concluded, I was thrust into the tutorial of the game. Here, I gradually uncovered the ways in which the Dupery introduced several of the character types and how each of them interact with each other and the grid in front of you.

In each case, there are several grids covered up with possible suspects as well as a tally of how many of each role there are (Innocent, Meddler, Underling, and Traitor). In each case, I needed to arrest the “bad guys”, but in order to successfully accomplish this, I needed to question and decide who is lying and who is telling the truth.

Going even further with this notion, each character type had certain tells or implications if they were telling the truth or if they were lying. In both cases, these actions forced me to not only see the characters as individuals, but also interpret how they influence the rest of the grid. For example, if I noticed that the Mathematician was lying about how many bad guys there are on the grid, then that leaves a healthy amount of suspicion on him and lets me focus my attention elsewhere on this case.

Dupery also has a nifty way of tracking your thought process as you are gathering data. Similar to other puzzle games like Picross or digital versions of Sudoku, you’re able to use symbols to distinguish who you think is lying, telling the truth, or are just not sure. Also, the game has a pen where you can literally write down notes to yourself, thumbtacks to tether suspects together, and scissors to cut those connections.

After about a twenty-five minute tutorial, I felt confident enough in my ability to suss out the suspicious scenarios and take on the crime syndicate. In each of my first few runs, I had a pretty good momentum. In each case, I was able to quickly identify the evil roles and complete the cases quickly. When the cases expanded into a fuller grid, I then began to put my detective hat on. It was a great time figuring out each of these logic puzzles through the investigation of each character along with some abilities I was able to gain through the game.