Knee Deep Act One: Wonderland Review

Knee Deep Act One: Wonderland is an interesting experience to say the least. It plays as an interactive storytelling game which was developed by Prologue Games and released back on the 6^th July 2015. It’s the first in a three part series with the second act (Festival) being released in November 2015.

The start of the game sees you in a theater about to watch the show, and the show itself is the game you’re about to play. It’s a pretty risky way to start a game but worked well, I was pretty hooked right from the start. You’re given a few theater related options like turning your phone on silent or checking the cast list which makes you want to keep watching to see what’s next.

The setting is a backwards little swamp town named Cypress Knee (Knee Deep… clever right?) where it’s all hit the fan. Seems Hollywood movie star, Tag Kerns has decided to test out his new Harry Houdini style magic trick but it’s not quite gone as planned, so he’s later found by a janitor (with a ridiculously crazy backstory involving underage girls and cocaine) swinging from a tower. Most of the rumors say it’s because of his recent decline in film quality with horrendous names like Meacham and Dystopic 12, which most of the characters think are worse than Hitler even though they paid money to go to see them.

You play as three different characters who have been tasked with getting the scoop on his suicide, but as you begin to investigate further you open up new clues that suggest Kern may not have had suicidal tendencies, but in actual fact this could be a murder case. You have a few different stories kicking off in the background such as the creepy and dark organization Church of Us who has a leader who seems surprisingly friendly and are obsessed with opto levels, two somewhat FBI looking strangers who threaten your main character every 5 minutes because you’ve stirred up some trouble and of course a bit of political corruption, because every story has to have some form of political corruption nowadays.

So, let’s meet the stars of the show:

Romana Teague – a successful blogger for Fanrage who goes by the alias Paedra. She’s going after the story to keep her job (which she hates) after she was found taking money from another company for a review in their favor. After a few minutes of the game it was clear she’s pretty aggressive so I decided to turn her into the most ruthless and insulting monster that I could who would stop at nothing to get the story, except being polite in the slightest possible way. She soon gets stalked with texts by an anonymous man who gives her helpful tidbits about the case.

Jack Bellet – a print reporter who’s recently got divorced from his wife who is made out to be a monster and him a nice guy, even though he’s brought his child to the crime scene of a murder and is trying to keep joint custody of him. Best dad ever! Perhaps I just took a dislike to him but for me it seemed he had the personality of a slightly damp carrot. I decided to try and make him into a nervous wreck but he just turned out to be the biggest douche bag of all time, so from that point on I refer to him in reality as Jack Bellend.

K.C. Gaddis – A detective who’s going through a lifelong rough patch. When you first meet him he’s seconds away from going the same way as Tag Kerns by eating a bullet sandwich in front of his dog (strange way to kill yourself, I’d prefer to go with the drink myself to death approach).  He’s stopped from painting the walls red by a phone call and is then asked to take the job of investigating the suicide. I tried to make him cool and suave so I could pretend he was Samuel L Jackson, but that stopped once he got knocked out by a girl. Understandably, girls can be tough but I’d just bigged myself up to someone saying I was all brains and brawn and then got knocked stone cold by a scrawny blogger seconds later.

This is another type of game where the choices you make have a direct impact on everything such as your reputation, the clues that you find to solve the case and your own morality. I like the idea of these games, but truth is that I always make the wrong choices. I’m always reminded of Dragon Age when I managed to lose not 1, but 3 members of my group as they weren’t happy with me as a leader and thought I was a sadistic, heartless monster for helping the mages, then showing them all how stabby my daggers were. In this kind of game though they work well, and it feels like the options you pick actually have an impact on the story. It’d be interesting to play through again to see the differences of stories as I intended to make one nice, one horrible and one cool. Shame my natural instincts kicked in and they all turned out to be crimes against humanity.

On top of the choices you make, every so often you’ll be prompted to write an article / blog post / detective report based on the clues that you’ve found so far. When you write it you can choose to be cautious, edgy or inflammatory and what you pick decides how characters view you and react to you in future. As Ramana I heavily slandered the relationship between Kern and his girlfriend as I found out they hadn’t fumbled around in the bedroom as of late, and that led to a heated conversation with her in which she wouldn’t really answer my questions but just insulted me, to which I then decide to write even more horrible things about them, so it’s nice to see that the developers have gone to that level of detail, even if I did use it for my own personal amusement.

I have to touch on the graphics a bit, but in my opinion, they aren’t great. The character models are a bit on the bulky side and the skins themselves don’t look too good, but I don’t think this was helped with the clothing each of the characters had on. The only clothes I liked were being worn by Romana the female character, which I suppose says more about myself than this game. In all honesty though, this type of game doesn’t really need to have top notch graphics. You’re telling a story, not blasting aliens in another dimension with a gun the size of a small tank, so the story is what matters. I still to this day say that the best game I have ever played was Final Fantasy 7. Sure the graphics (compared to today’s standard) are awful, but the story and the content make it an incredible game.

The environments are well laid out and it fits in perfectly with the theatrical element of the gameplay. The characters move from one location to another by walking across the stage, which makes you feel like you are watching a show, not playing a game. Some of the locations are interesting and include a motel, a trailer, an American diner and a few others. They give the scene more of a feel as your typical run down stop-gap between where you started and where you’re headed too, and maybe that’s why all the characters are there, all of them headed towards their final destination in life (seriously, that sounded so much deeper in my head).

The sound in the game is fantastic. I really enjoyed the slow, country style acoustic guitar sound and it fits in so well with the scenes and the atmosphere of the game. I really think it’s one of the best things about it all and the developers nailed it completely. It can drag on a little bit so my only criticism is that there should be a bit more variation as I found myself listening to the same loop quite often and beginning to think that maybe Tag Kerns did the right thing if he also had to listen to this 24-7 for the rest of his life, that said once it kicks into the main music it can bring your attention back and I could easily have listened to some of the main songs for hours on end.

The story of the game is solid but it feels like sometimes it tries too hard to be random and funny. There are some funny moments in the game through natural means, but the bits where it is purposefully trying to be funny just aren’t. A game like this shouldn’t need to try because it’s already got a specified genre and it pulls it off well. There was some beautifully scripted moments that actually shocked me, and whilst I understand that sometimes variation is needed, it already has everything that a game like this needs without trying to be funny. I just found it a bit of overkill when my character was able to spit out random lines for the sake of it.

The bit that I don’t really want to mention but have too is the lack of content and interaction with the game itself. I found myself dozing off on more than one occasion and this is purely down to the fact that there is nothing to do other than point and click. Yes, the story is great, the sound is brilliant and the theatrical atmosphere makes for one perfect game IF there was more to do. A game is a game because it requires a certain level of interaction and activity. You wouldn’t call a ‘choose your own adventure’ book a game just because you get to pick what happens, it’s still a book. You would call Heavy Rain a game because you control the character and you have a few quick time events and use more than one button to play.

Personally, I didn’t enjoy the game as much as I wanted too. The start of it gripped me so well and pulled me into what is an amazing story line and a brilliant soundtrack, but as I mentioned before, I found myself falling asleep in and out of gameplay due to the lack of things to do except read conversations and click, which I found myself clicking mostly randomly towards the end. When I finally had to put some pieces of a QR code together it felt like all my christmas’ had come at once.

It would have been nice to relate a little bit more to the suicide victim as well because (and I’m showing why all my Dragon Age party left me eventually) I didn’t know him or anything about him. Sure it was my job in the game to look into why he’d tried to kill himself, but I had no connection to them to care about it in reality. The same can be said about the characters, perhaps it was the way I was playing but all of them seemed like pretty horrible people who I wouldn’t want to be associated with at all.

The game has flaws, but overall it’s not bad. There are some improvements that could be made by adding some minor levels of interaction like a few more mini games and being able to walk your character around locations before letting them transition and letting the player get to know the character a bit more or learn about their past. If the developers add these two minor improvements into their next games then you’ll likely see them up in the charts in the next few years. If you like storytelling games which are more like films then I would strongly recommend this game for you, if not then either give it a play or wait to see if act two has more interaction.

Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.