Gnosia

Gnosia is a single-player version of Werewolf mixed with looping game elements. What’s Werewolf you might ask? It’s a social game that involves two different teams: Werewolves and villagers. The game is played in segments called “days,” and each day all of the villagers (including the wolves) get together to deliberate who is actually a werewolf in disguise, and then vote to eliminate whoever they deem to be the most suspicious each day. The villagers win by successfully voting out all the werewolves, and the werewolves win by having an equal or less number of remaining villagers at the start of the day. To speed the process up, the wolves get to kill off one villager in secret each night after voting has finished. The game also goes by Mafia, but werewolf is probably the more popular variant of the two nowadays. It’s a great social experience, that relies on things like deception and deductive reasoning to lead the crowd in your favor. Rounds also tend to be pretty short, at maybe 20-30 minutes max, but how do you make a game like this into a single player game?

Gnosia takes an interesting spin on werewolf not by changing it to fit a single-player experience, but instead by using it as the crux for it’s narrative. The player character is stuck in an endless series of loops, with each loop resetting whenever the character dies or eliminates all threats around them. Aka, whenever the game of werewolf is over. Instead of werewolves being the main antagonistic force, it’s a space virus called Gnosia. Gnosia is a weird hivemind infection that forces its hosts to kill the uninfected. Not much is known about the Gnosia infection when the game starts, but bits and pieces of what it is and where it comes from slowly work their way into the story over several different loops. Instead of villagers voting on who to execute, it’s the other passengers onboard the spaceship picking who goes into cold-slumber, which is about the same as execution. The ideal situation is to have as many uninfected survive as possible, but that’s a rather hard goal to achieve.

When the game beings the player is given an item called the Silver Key, which functions as an encyclopedia of sorts. It mostly keeps track of information about other characters, but is also the cornerstone of just about everything in the game. The Silver Key will not be content in releasing its host from its endlessly looping prison until it has absorbed enough knowledge, and in this case, that means learning all it can about the other passengers on board the ship. Information and story beats are dropped in one of two ways: by either finishing a round or having a special conversation trigger after voting has finished for the day.

Note that finishing a round and winning a round are two very different scenarios. My personal favorite part of what Gnosia does is removing the perceived “good” and “bad” from the two teams. The game will start out by having the player try to win rounds, regardless of if they are infected or not, but the game gets more complex once the player is in the actual meat of the story. Some conversation triggers will take multiple nights to complete, requiring the player to keep not only themselves, but another character alive through several days as well. Sometimes the player character is human and the other character is infected, creating a weird dynamic that has the player going against the most basic of all werewolf rules.

The Silver Key does give some amount of control to the player in game-setup though. After enough rounds, the player can choose how many characters there are, how many of what special roll is available, the player character’s own roll, and even the number of infected. All of these are very important, and the game even stresses several times that the player should experiment with the numbers and rolls as much as possible. If the player gets stuck for too many cycles the Key will eventually hand over the ability to automatically build scenarios, giving a higher chance for events to trigger by setting up everything as it needs to for said events.

The player is also given a variety of tools to help steer the conversation each round in their favor. Finishing loops will reward an amount of experience points that can be spent to level up a variety of stats. Each one affects a different aspect of the game like getting characters to more reliably listen to the player, or making it less likely that the Gnosia-infected enemies will kill the player off in the night. Putting enough points into certain stats will even unlock special skills that can dramatically shift the conversation around. These are mostly phrases or questions that can be asked of the group.

For example, one of my favorite higher-level skills is asking “Are you human?” It’s meant to be a sort of charisma check, as higher-charisma characters can tell when lower charisma ones are lying, the player included. The player can only use the question once per-loop, but it’s impact can heavily shift the game if used right.

The primary function of the skill is to detect liars, but it can also be used to help vote certain characters out, regardless of if they are infected or not. Each character has their own set of little quirks, and this particular question preys on that. The majority of the cast will answer “yes,” since they are probably not infected, but there always two or three specific characters that will refuse to answer it because of how the question is worded.

“What is human?” and “What is normal?” are very big parts of the game’s sub-plot. Each character has some aspect of themselves that they find “abnormal,” and for some, that weight is a bit heavier than others. These specific characters that will always refuse to answer the question do so because they see themselves as either less or more than what “human,” means to them.

It’s very subtle, but there’s often some method to the madness Gnosia’s cast speaks in. A lot of the characters seems very strange or off-kilter, but the more the player digs, the more they’ll realize how each character is written to act. Some characters will hate each other, and rarely back each other up, some love each other, and will almost always give the other the benefit of the doubt. Some even have one-sided hate or love for another, and learning to recognize or abuse that can often be the most effective way to reach certain endings or paths when combined with conversation skills.

I’m a big fan of Gnosia’s writing, even if the majority of what the player will be reading is looped text in the debate rounds. Those little subtleties I mentioned are worked in so well to the debate text, that finally catching the meaning behind words or phrases feels like solving a major mystery on its own. But, as much as I love the writing, the diversity in the cast, and the various origin stories of each crew member on the ship, I do have a few hang-ups.

It took me over 100 loops to fully complete the game, or at least to fill up the Silver Key and reach the end credits, but there were a few plot holes left, or just things that felt like they were the start of something, but never reached fruition. Without spoiling too much, one scene involves a certain pair of characters being put on guard duty, and it turns out if they both end up in the role, they’ll kill everyone on the ship despite being human. In a later loop I had these two characters end up on guard duty again, and was hoping I might get an explanation why what happens, happens… except I didn’t. That particular beat never came up again, nor was the relationship between those particular characters ever referenced again.

The game also has a very odd fixation of having the player character “accidentally” stumble upon characters in the shower. I get that it’s an easy gag to pull off, and several of these characters were obviously designed with sex in mind, but sometimes what these scenes reveals needs a bit more seriousness to it than potential titillation. However; the vast majority of the game is fine, and the amount of ridiculousness and seriousness is generally well-paced out.

I think Gnosia’s aesthetics are at their best when it’s playing out as a horror game. The artwork is visually interesting, and often times very strange. The character designs were actually the thing that pulled me into the game in the first place. The soundtrack also hits a lot of different emotions very well, but I think it’s at its best during tense or depressing scenes. It has a very “futuristic” sound style, for lack of a better term, and I think it does a great job at capturing the emptiness of space and tension of being alone, which are when most of the unsettling revelations in the plot come about.

Gnosia was developed and localized by a very small team of people, and the amount of polish and love in it shows. The game can get a little repetitive at times by nature, but I think it’s pacing is done just well enough that it can string the player along properly to reach the ending. I honestly can’t think of a game from the past several years that I think intermingles its characters and gameplay so well. I think anyone that’s a fan of science-fiction, or at least the narrative themes of science fiction, should definitely give Gnosia a try. Even if you aren’t though, the experience itself is so unique and interesting that can’t help but feel compelled to recommend it.