- Publisher: Devolver Digital
- Release Date: Jan 22, 2018
- Also On: Switch
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
- Unscored
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Jan 31, 2018The Red Strings Club is a game with refined dialogue and sublimely implemented choices. It sets a new standard for story-driven adventure games that can be seen as literature.
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Jan 23, 2018If you’ve been around gaming long enough then you remember with a lot of fondness the old adventure games. You can go as far back as pure text adventures or you can go to what was arguably the heyday with Sierra and then Lucasarts. The Red Strings Club harks back to those games visually with it’s pixel-art style… but much as us gamers have grown up… the subject matter has too. While those formerly mentioned game companies would frequently scatter more mature content throughout via little jokes and such, The Red Strings Club is fully immersed in mature themes and it’s a great way to experience that nostalgia in the modern age.
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Jan 22, 2018The Red Strings Club is a vehicle for some of the most engrossing cyberpunk stories I’ve witnessed in recent memory.
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Feb 12, 2018Quotation forthcoming.
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Feb 2, 2018The Red Strings Club is provocative but not preachy, smart but not smug, and poignant but not pretentious. And it’s just that extra bit self-assertive like all the great stories need to be. Most of all, if you play the game true to your own conscious, it gives us hope. The Red Strings Club makes perfect use of its medium as an interactive thriller, challenging you inside out. Maybe I’m getting old, but when a game makes me cry at the end, it must be something special.
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Jan 24, 2018The Red Strings Club deeply explores human emotions and feelings, giving the player the opportunity to play with them.
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Jan 23, 2018This is a unique experience, one of those games you don't expect to surprise you or make you think, and then you're blown away. Brilliant writing and clever design work together to create a game you don't want to miss.
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Jan 22, 2018The Red Strings Club is a tense adventure about a cast of characters that endanger themselves for goals that aren't necessarily guaranteed, a rewarding journey into the human soul, and a game that pushes the limits of what a point-and-click adventure can do.
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Jan 22, 2018The Red Strings Club is a perfect example of how to create a sublime and intrinsic moral debate within a deep story and a great and well developed world. A masterpiece of graphic adventures, absolutely recommendable for those who are fans of the genre and for those who aren’t.
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Jan 22, 2018Ultimately, The Red Strings Club tries and succeeds to be deeply thought provoking. Whereas other sci-fi games can tell a great story and make the player fear for a hypothetical future, few have made me question my personal definitions on fate, ethics and humanity. Maybe it’s because The Red Strings Club isn’t weighed down by all the empowerment that traditional action sci-fi games wear on their sleeve. Maybe it’s because the writing is simply out of this world. Either way, I can imagine this game is something which sci-fi and narrative game fans alike have been waiting eons to see – so try it out for yourself and just try to come out unchanged.
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Jan 22, 2018The creators of Gods Will Be Watching bring us The Red Strings Club, a cyberpunk conversational adventure about happiness, fate and the power of technology corporations. It builds a multilinear plot with deep, diverse and complex characters. The game is varied thanks to different mechanics, like serving cocktails or making pottery, that interweaves with profound conversations in which we must research about a dystopian-ish enterprise.
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Jan 22, 2018The Red Strings Club is a true cyberpunk classic. Pixel-art visuals and a cyberpunk world make way for fascinating gameplay and a truly compelling, well written story. The game will force you to make tough decisions while questioning your own thoughts about important, current day topics. This is an indie title you won't want to miss.
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Jan 23, 2018Under the disguise of a traditional point and click adventure, The Red Strings Club shows us once again the ability of Decostructeam to use videogames to explore the human soul. The story is a pretty standard cyberpunk tale, but the "alcohol system" during conversations at the bar is amazing, and the moral choices are intriguing and demanding.
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Jan 22, 2018If you love the genre and if you appreciate the graphic adventures, then you cannot miss this little Devolver Digital jewel.
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Jan 25, 2018The Red Strings Club is an intense experience that you should play at least once. This game will make you think about your message for days.
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Mar 7, 2018The underwhelming mouse-based elements are frustrating because they’re so unnecessary when compared to the interesting stuff going on with the characters and concepts. When it acts more like a visual novel, The Red Strings Club work crackles with lively ideas and compelling characters. Had it focused on that and pared away the irrelevancies, The Red Strings Club would be the amazing experience that it almost was.
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Jan 24, 2018The Red Strings Club is a great adventure game with an fantastic plot and amazing narrative with a lot of tough decisions.
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Jan 22, 2018Deconstructeam's narrative makes The Red Strings Club one of the best reflections in the media about making games, why we create things and why the megacorporations are the evil incarnate.
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Feb 26, 2018The gameplay of The Red Strings Club is not very demanding, but it challenges our brains with complex philosophical questions.
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Jan 2, 2019In the cyberpunk world of The Red Strings Club, player agency takes a backseat to a complex story teeming with personality and impactful moments, generating challenge through moral dilemma rather than gameplay.
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Jan 2, 2019In the cyberpunk world of The Red Strings Club, player agency takes a backseat to a complex story teeming with personality and impactful moments, generating challenge through moral dilemma rather than gameplay.
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games(TM)Feb 22, 2018A compelling adventure full of great ideas. [Issue#197, p.82]
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Feb 8, 2018The Red Strings Club is a story-driven, pixel-art style point & click adventure that makes you think, think and think; about a very possible future that may just be around the corner for us, and about the current troubles that human race is facing.
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Feb 5, 2018The Red Strings Club in an excellent story-driven game that offers a beautiful pixel design and a very interesting narrative gameplay.
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Feb 2, 2018Thought-provoking and heart-warming, The Red Strings Club may be brief but it’s good to the last drop.
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Jan 30, 2018The Red Strings Club is a highly original and well-polished title. The cyberpunk mystery is deeply satisfying, with a heavy story that explores interesting ethical questions and the gameplay mechanics, score, and a visual aesthetic that complement the plot wonderfully. The only real flaw of this title is a playthrough length that leaves you wanting more.
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Jan 30, 2018A cyberpunk exploration of humanity, manipulation and getting tanked, The Red Strings club is lovely and melancholy and well worth a look.
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Jan 23, 2018A short but thought-provoking story with interesting moral choices to make and enough player engagement to keep you involved.
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Jan 22, 2018Seeing the way that your decisions ripple outward and affect other parts of the game adds a sense of weight to every scene.
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Jan 22, 2018Thanks to an incredible and thought-provoking story, a cast of well-rounded characters, and simple yet highly effective gameplay, The Red Strings Club easily kicks off 2018 on the right foot when it comes to adventure games. It’s a stellar cyberpunk story that easily keeps you coming back for more, thanks to its multiple narrative options and endings.
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Jan 22, 2018Despite some poor controls for minigames, The Red Strings Club conceptually flourishes, with fascinating subject matter, well-written characters, and unique approaches to gameplay. I enjoyed feeling like a puppeteer as I made others do my bidding by exploiting their emotions or deceiving them through phone calls. However, these actions begged a bigger question: Was I just as bad as the mega corporation? Was I playing god? The Red Strings Club had me pondering these moral questions for days.
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Jan 22, 2018The Red Strings Club is a fascinating exploration of humanity, emotion, ethics, and our own preconceptions of evil. It tackles some huge topics, and while it does not manage to meet all of it’s potential it is worth playing just to visit The Red Strings Club, pull up a chair, and try something different.
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Feb 28, 2018A good game, but not a masterpiece, The Red Strings Club has a lot of ”Chekhov’s guns” that never fire a shot, and reveals a huge twist 5 minutes before the credits roll. I like the concept of this twist, but it appears without rhyme or reason. Still, you will feel a surge of emotions when the game will ask you to make that final, heard-shredding choice.
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Jan 24, 2018The Red Strings Club is a clever (and occasionally quite confronting) narrative experience that blends a compelling cocktail of ethical quandaries and social engineering, with a fresh slice of low-stress minigames. Served chilled.
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CD-ActionMay 16, 2018A skillfully written, nonlinear interactive movie that despite its cyberpunk setting touches upon modern topics (like the LGBT movement or disabilities) and does it in a tactful, natural way. [04/2018, p.51]
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Jan 29, 2018The Red Strings Club offers up a great cyberpunk narrative. One where the mechanics-driven activities like mixing drinks and building genetic augmentations only serve to add doubt and flesh out a memorable cast of characters. Coupled with a great soundtrack that doesn’t lean on any one style, wonderful locations, and a few surprising twists, it offers an impressive future-tale. One that isn’t afraid to delve into the idea of friendship, humanity, and what technological breakthroughs can bring us as a species.
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Jan 25, 2018The Red Strings Club develops the dystopia of a world without emotions through cocktails and dialogues. With moments of gameplay as strange as it is interesting.
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Jan 31, 2018Even though its writing comes off mostly as a well-meaning but adolescently naïve and anime inspired take on the bleak cyberpunk dystopia towards which we are invariably headed, The Red Strings Club piques the player’s interest by constantly throwing a new gameplay mechanic at them, with its social engineering mini-game presenting a rewarding challenge that all cyberpunk enthusiasts will relish.
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Jan 26, 2018Red Strings Club is more of a visual novel than a true adventure game, but its roughly four-hour story will give you some topics for your brain to chew on. The conversational gameplay, not to mention the drink mixing minigame, are a lot of fun.
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Jan 23, 2018An atmospheric, imaginative cyberpunk adventure with a human heart beating beneath its metal exoskeleton.
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Jan 29, 2018The Red Strings Club isn’t afraid to stop you in your tracks with its dialogue — to challenge your ideas and principles — but in the pursuit of this it too often fumbles.
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Jan 23, 2018You can try The Red Strings Club if you are a fan of cyberpunk stories, visual novels and retrowave. Just know that the game has a really slow pace and sometimes can be boring.
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Feb 2, 2018Although there is almost every cyberpunk cliché to be found somewhere, the themes and dialogues are put together well. Which can’t be said about the actual playing mechanics, since they leave a lot to be desired.
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Feb 18, 2018In spite of a few good ideas and an appealing atmosphere, The Red Strings Club falls a bit short to be warmingly recommended because it's quite repetitive and very short to beat (around 3h). Moreover, the dull story and the weak technical side of things makes it tough to be enthusiastic.
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LEVEL (Czech Republic)Sep 13, 2018At first sight a cliché retro cyberpunk, but beneath the surface excellent and with humanity imbued game. It's a shame that after some time you will be bored and even angry with some of its features. [Issue#284]
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Jan 23, 2018Sadly, The Red Strings Club will fool some into thinking it follows in the footsteps of classics from WadjetEye Games purely because of its aesthetics. Do not be mistaken, though. This is not a patch on any of that company's releases, nor is it affiliated with it at all. Instead, this takes an intriguing style and theme of the world gone mad for technology, mixes in some extremely random love story between the lead duo of hacker and bartender that bears no relevance to the underlying tale, adds in a heavy dose of some of the most painful attempts at puzzles, and then perfectly tops it all off with an overly wordy script filled with too much padding.
| This publication does not provide a score for their reviews. | |
| This publication has not posted a final review score yet. | |
| These unscored reviews do not factor into the Metascore calculation. | |
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Feb 7, 2018It’s a great game to fill a contemplative afternoon.
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Jan 2, 2019Its strength is in the performances and dialogue of its characters, who ask difficult questions about free will and social order.
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Jan 22, 2018If you’ve any interest in transhumanist philosophy or even ethics in general, then you owe it to yourself to pick this one up. If you don’t, then The Red Strings Club should still hit the spot – and you might find you have more to say the next time someone asks you about the nature of happiness. [RPS Recommended]
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Jan 22, 2018The new game from the creators of 'Gods Will Be Watching" has bold, refreshing ideas about future sex—but also a pitfall into transphobia.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 101 out of 143
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Mixed: 25 out of 143
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Negative: 17 out of 143
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Jan 23, 2018
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Mar 11, 2019Great game, full of moral dilemmas. Well implemented: a dark metropol, neon lights, corporations, fake people, utterly depressing.
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Feb 16, 2019Stop shoving politics down my throat, it's annoying. Seriously and the game's lame.