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leaf99's This is the Police (PC)
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| [February 15, 2018 09:35:30 AM]
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Game Log 2 Part 3 – This Is the Police
More happened during this session than the last. After repeatedly refusing to help the mafia, I got murdered in my kitchen one day. This led to a game over, and I had to lose several days of progress in order to keep playing. On the bright side, this meant I could save a few officers that ended up killed by the mafia, at least for a couple more days until they were all killed on another job.
At this point, the main character has gotten pulled into a war between two crime organizations – the Sand family, and some guy named Vargas. I decided to help the Sands because I at least knew a bit about them, but I’m sure this is going to end up with me having huge problems with the law later in the game.
I did figure out this time that I can send less effective officers along with more experienced officers, and everyone gets a boost to their skills when they succeed. This was helpful when I got two new hiring slots by letting some guy sponsor them on the condition that I hire and never fire his terrible nephew. The nephew is still useless on his own, but so long as he doesn’t get murdered, he’ll eventually get up to par with the rest this way.
Having played for a while now, I can say this game is on point in terms of design. Everything is terrible, but it’s supposed to be terrible, and each component of the game drives that point home, from the narrative snippets, to the directives from the various factions, to the personality of the main character. Corruption is the only way to get by in these situations, and that in itself illuminates why people might become corrupt. You’re casually asked to do terrible things, and people die when you don’t.
This wraps up my gamelog for this game, but I am going to keep playing. Even if there isn’t a light at the end of the tunnel for this story, I want to see how the choices I’ve made affect the ending. If nothing else, I want to see if I can keep the main character alive long enough to even get there. Given how things have gone with him, it’s going to be quite the challenge.
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| [February 14, 2018 01:17:33 PM]
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Game Log 2, Part 2 – This Is the Police
This play session was less eventful than the last. There weren’t as many story snippets, and the gameplay has started to get tedious. Still, the game keeps throwing hard choices at me just by nature of its mechanics. Every situation I have to send police for requests the best officers, and I can’t afford to send the best all of the time. Meanwhile the mafia keeps asking for favors and threatening me when I don’t help them out. A couple of times I just went straight down the corruption rabbit hole and did what they needed so they didn’t show up and murder the main character in his sleep.
The kicker here is that city hall is barely any better. Between “fire all black cops” and “use firearms on a feminist protest,” I’m realizing how terrible the situation really is for the city, and for the main character. The two organizations that can make or ruin me (the mafia and city hall) are both awful. No one is giving quests, so to speak, for acting like a decent human being, and with resources stretched thinner as the levels go on, it’s getting harder and harder to get by while doing the right thing.
This game reminds me of Papers, Please in some ways, but the more dangerous, stressful, evolved version of it. In Papers, Please, you could do the right thing all the time if you played your cards right. In this game you can try to do the right thing, and it still ends up with people dead. As hard as that makes the experience of playing, I admire that the game just goes for it in that regard. I just hope there are more plot advancements next time, or the day-to-day gameplay is going to get even more tedious moving forward.
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| [February 13, 2018 11:25:21 PM]
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Game Log 2, Part 1 - This Is the Police
When I started This Is the Police, I had no idea how much of a downer it was going to be, but I quickly found out that the game doesn’t sugarcoat anything. The story is miserable, most of the choices you make are between one bad option and another bad option, and the main character is hard to like. It took a while to get to the actual gameplay, and once I was there I lost officers left and right. Yet despite the grim nature of it all, the game is strangely engaging, throwing complicated moral questions at me rapid-fire. For example, should I send fewer cops than recommended to a crime in progress because another crime may happen soon after? Do I fire the elderly cop because she can’t do her job properly anymore? Do I give someone a day off to help their friend, keeping them loyal to me, but endangering the city? Needless to say, the game is a high-stress experience.
I got through the first week or so in my first play session (the game covers 180 days according to an early cutscene), and ended up faced with a choice: Do I agree to help out the mafia to save my friend’s life, or do I let him get murdered for being in a situation he got himself into? I considered helping him, but decided that I’d rather not have the complication of dealing with the mafia while trying to balance the needs of the city and my employees, so I told him no, trying to think of the bigger picture.
As a result of this choice, I got to close out the session with a graphic picture of this friend and his family all dead, and a call from the mafia saying I was going to work for them anyway, or else. This result really got to me, and made me want to go back and try the other option. I actually felt culpable for what happened, which often doesn’t happen for me in games with moral choices. I suspect that it worked here because there wasn’t a clear ‘good’ or ‘evil’ choice presented. Each one appeared to have its pros and cons until after the choice, when I found out nothing good came from refusing to help Kendrick. It was quite the emotional ride, and I’m interested to see what happens next.
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leaf99's This is the Police (PC)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Tuesday 13 February, 2018
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