Game: Save Koch
Genre: Adventure, Simulation, Strategy, Puzzle
System: Nintendo Switch (also available on Steam)
Developers/Publishers: OverGamez
Price: £17.99| €19.99|US $19.99| CA $26.25|AU $30.00
Age Rating: PEGI 12, US T
Release Date: 6th March 2020
Review Code provided by OverGamez
Animal Farm meets The Godfather
Another day is beginning to wane. All seems well—you’re in the safety of your home, your Family is under control, your wife is missing, but at least your daughter is doing alright. Of course, all this suddenly changes. A secret team barges into your home, snatches you and throws you into a van, and under the cover of night you’re taken to a panic room. You get a call; someone’s out to get you. They’re planning to take you and your enterprise down. You’ve got six days to figure out who it is.
This is the plot of Save Koch, a simulation and strategy game that has you parsing through loads of information about a plethora of characters to try and pinpoint the assailant.
Is the government working against you, is it the sentient mold that runs a cult throughout the city, or perhaps is it someone in your own Family? Playing as the mafia kingpin, Joseph Koch, you are confined to your panic room where you must dictate orders to your underlings through your tablet, make and receive phone calls, and check your data board for clues about each of your contacts. Let me tell you this: this game is hard. Collecting clues and piecing information together seems easy enough, but because each new playthrough of the game randomizes the possible “mole” your trying to uncover, you have to be extremely on top of how you’re collecting and digesting information as well as how you’re talking with certain potential suspects as well. You can’t trust anyone in this game.
Think Clue, but on Maniac Mode
If you haven’t realized by now, this game is chock full of information. I knew nothing about this game when I first jumped in. And let me tell you, Save Koch offers no learning curve. You are literally assaulted with information, dialogue, and characters from the get-go.
As the player, you have very little transition into Joseph Koch’s life and who he knows. During the first day you are hit with a phone call, it’s your trusted ally Burmy, who basically tells you the point of the game: you have six days to figure out the mole. Call people and check your tablet. That’s it.
The use of your tablet is where most of the action takes place. Essentially you have Burmy and three other agents, Scooter, Clip-Clop, and Melinda, who have certain skill sets. Clip-Clop is a great thief but a horrible conversationalist. On the tablet there are certain areas you can choose to investigate. These possible investigations could be surveillance jobs, crime scene investigation, assault, or even just chatting with certain groups for info. You basically have to click on these jobs to see what it’s about, send an agent to that job, and hope the mission is successful. Since your agents have a limited range of abilities, you have to be careful not to send, say, Clip-Clop on a mission to uncover info. Actually, this is a lot harder than it seems.
The actions you choose in your playthrough determine whether you can unlock more agents with different abilities down the line. There’s a character in the game that you meet, Vicky, who is essentially on your team but you have to successfully complete certain missions to unlock her character. She was a gossiper and would be great at the conversations that Clip-Clop couldn’t participate in. I played this game three times and was unable to successfully recruit anyone. Therefore, I was stuck with the first three agents and their skills. This really limited my ability to send them out on surveillance or security missions. Failing in missions sometimes led to gaining new clues, but more often than not my agents would die.
Yes, they die. And it sucks. Scooter, my dual doctor and assassin, was killed on an early mission. He didn’t just die though. His wife was angry at us and threatened to leak our plans. This kind of effect only messed things up even more. I was planning on having her killed to shut her up (I really discovered a new side of myself while playing this game), but none of my agents were free and she basically spread info about us.
You see, not only are you hit with a ton of little missions that all have consequences, you have to decide which ones to pursue and which to leave behind. These missions are only available for a limited amount of time, and with only four agents to work with you’re going to be missing a lot potential clue mining. Therefore, you have to read these missions and decide which ones seem as though they could lead you in the right direction.
But to make things even harder (as though they weren’t hard enough) there’s a ton of extra stuff going on that really feels like it leads nowhere. I spent quite a bit of time having my agents train some locals in surveillance, but I really didn’t get anything out of it. I didn’t get any clues or unlock any new agents. Perhaps there was something that came of it, but in the end, some of these leads just felt like they led nowhere. I chased some vandals, dealt with one of my agent’s ex-husbands, and guarded some kids during their graduation. During my next several playthroughs I decided to try and ignore some of these extra events, which leads me to my next point: repetitiveness.
A Never-Ending Story
Like I said before, I played this game three times. I lost every single time. In a game like this, you aren’t supposed to win easily. However, as I played again and again, I began to find the plot to be a bit tedious. The benefit of playing this game over and over is that you get a better understanding of the characters and the basic mechanics of the games. The first playthrough I did I couldn’t even figure out how to turn on the screen with all the clues, or how to get generic replacement agents for my fallen ones. My first playthrough was actually a very frustrated endeavor trying to figure out how to even play the game. Only during my second round did I begin to figure things out.
However, by then, I was reading through a lot of the same dialogue. There’s a lot of core characters and core dialogue that doesn’t disappear or change in your playthroughs. Sometimes conversations allow for multiple answer choices which led to different conclusions. However, it was also the case that sometimes these answers led to the same result. Not just the dialogue, but many of the missions are the same too. Of course, there was some variance in each of my playthroughs. In my first I had this tragic even sequence of my daughter dying and holding her funeral. There were also a few instances where I had heard of certain characters being mentioned but didn’t actually see them until my second or third playthrough. What I’m saying is this: there’s variance in the dialogue and missions of Save Koch, but there’s not enough to break the repetitive aspect of the game.
A Well-crafted World
Even though much of my time playing this game was spent in a cloud of confusion and frustration, I do have to say this. The creators behind this game really fleshed out this world. The various screens are limited, you essentially move back and forth between the tablet screen and the view of your panic room. However, I honestly felt all the little details of the game—like the sounds of various actions, the vibrations of your switch that rumble when a phone calls, and even the little grunts from Koch when you press objects on the touch screen—really added to the polish of the overall product. You’re never in a static space.
Dialogue moves in text boxes and every now and then your shark tank turns into a television and broadcasts the local news. Every now and then, like when you fall asleep at the end of a day or unlock a certain ending, comic-like scenes begin to play out. Characters range from anthropomorphic animals to washed out humans to a sentient disease. Some may find this art style a little disturbing, which I did at first, but I quickly found it to portray the Koch’s world quite well. In other words, it was believable.
Conclusion
I don’t think Save Koch is a game for everyone. And because this is a family-friendly site, I do need to mention that this game has a lot of inappropriate language. I even found some of the dialogue to be downright gross.
This game is chock-full of lore and requires multiple playthroughs to really understand the basic mechanics and eventually how to be strategic. Each choice you make is vital, as it affects a potential ending or acquirement of a new agent.
I did think this game to be well-crafted, but I had to wonder if the developers realized that the sheer amount of information in the game, though appealing to some, is daunting and impassible to others. With that being said, Save Koch is not a bad game. Rather, it’s just not an accessible game. But if you like solving puzzles, categorizing clues, and working against the clock, then I think this game is definitely worth checking out.
Final Verdict: I’m not sure 