On one hand, Gnosia is a mix of two genres I don’t particularly care about – a social deduction game and a visual novel. On another – it’s so shockingly fascinating and well put together, that I was engaged until the final ending of the game.
You read that right – this is a mix of two genres that don’t seem compatible. Social deduction games (like Mafia or Werewolf) tend to be multiplayer titles with little to no story, like its popular video game adaptations – Town of Salem or Among Us. While Visual Novels are almost exclusively singleplayer games about telling a linear (but often full of divergent paths and choices) story. So how can this work?
The main gameplay is all based around the Mafia-like process, except all of the characters involved (apart from the player) are NPCs. To make it interesting, all of these NPCs have lots of special traits and skills to them, meaning that whenever they are an enemy (titular Gnosia) or a human of any supporting role, they have certain “patterns” to them. A lot of this isn’t extremely obvious, to not make the game boring, yet a patient and attentive player will start noticing the specific choices and elements of behavior between the loops.
Oh and yes – the loops. The overall structure of the game is based around a time loop of several days, after the presence of Gnosia-infected humans is discovered until the victory of one of the sides, after which the loop resets. The properties of each loop change, so people usually change roles and you yourself will get to play all roles as well. The game will explain all of this (and much more) via the story driven interludes between the arguments about who suspects whom, which play as a Visual Novel.
And eventually you will be given a lot of freedom in how you want to play the game, while also searching for special events that can trigger with different properties. Some of which tell more about the characters and the overall story. And some might unlock the NPC skills for you. Because you get a set of skills and attributes of your own to affect the gameplay, since you’re dealing with the NPCs and not real players. It’s a very simple, but a very engaging concept and if you like the social deduction type games, you will probably love this.
If you don’t… Well, I have to say that the game does take a bit too long to go through the story, if you care about it first and foremost and I do wish that some of the story events weren’t so hard to trigger. It does get easier with leveling up and your own experience, and it does seem like the game gets progressively more lenient on letting you achieve the goal, although maybe I was imagining things. But if you don’t like the main gameplay loop, you might start getting a bit bored at a certain point. I’m very glad I went through it to the end. But I won’t keep on searching for non-vital events and unlocking the last skills.
Gnosia is a shockingly good game with really awesome soundtrack, simple but engaging gameplay and story and memorable characters. It falters from time to time. And I wish it didn’t do the typical “everyone is horny about the player” visual novel thing at several points. But it wasn’t enough to detract from my enjoyment and I definitely recommend checking Gnosia out.