Knee Deep

The game offers branching paths much like Quantum Break, but the ending doesn’t change much. It’s quite disappointing given what I would say is an overall great story.

Knee Deep is a conversational adventure where we’ll have to solve the mystery around a movie star’s suicide. Despite its original staging, Knee Deep tries to offer more than it cans. With some simpler graphics and a less complicated script, Prologue Games would have achieved a much better product.

Knee Deep features an interesting noir murder story narrated as a theatrical performance, but with a too low level of interaction only limited to dialogues and a few overly easy mini-games. The absence of foreign (Italian, in this case) localization with very colloquial and slangy dialogues doesn't help, either.

Man, is Knee Deep ever slow, though. Few indie games have ever presented me with such a slow campaign to work through, let alone one that is so dialogue heavy. And, while I’m not one to scoff at individuality, with a heavy reliance on dialogue, or just reading in general, it did become too much at times. It was during those moments where I wondered if it would have been better served as a book, movie or TV show.

Very little player interaction is involved, but conversation options can allow players to shape the characters so that it feels like they are creating their own story. Unfortunately, that feeling is short lived when all choices lead to the same story conclusion and characters are left underdeveloped. The puzzles that are intended to add extra gameplay end up falling flat because they're too easy. The result is an experience that is satisfactory for a single playthrough but becomes repetitive and boring across multiple playthroughs, which is something that the achievements encourage.