The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker

Genre: FMV Game

Players: 1

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Review:

The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker is a murder mystery where you are trying to get to the bottom of the murder of the titular doctor, a psychiatrist whose patients are all more than a little unusual. Did his patients kill him? Did his colleagues? Or is there something even stranger going on?

You take the role of a psychiatrist taking up the doctor’s prior patients and interviewing them to learn more about them, him, and ultimately get to the bottom of just what’s going on.

The game’s story is told almost entirely via FMV video clips of the various patients, which you can cycle through at your leisure. The cast of characters is memorable, and for the most part well-acted. You’ll definitely feel Marianna’s flirtations and Bryce’s hostility, just as two examples. What’s more, as you slowly piece things together, the game does a great job of piecing together the greater mystery that ties these people together, that goes above and beyond the murder that preceded the game.

Being an FMV game, you don’t interact directly with the game’s characters. Instead, you’ll have a selection of questions you can ask based on the context of what has already been said, but you can also type in questions to pry deeper.

This is actually one of the more delightful parts of the game… and one of the worst. See, the game uses an on-screen keyboard (ugh) to type in questions, but it also supports a USB keyboard plugged into dock in docked mode, which is a really nice feature.

Unfortunately, this is also where the game’s limitations come to the forefront. The game is very picky about the wording of questions it will accept, in some cases refusing to accept questions only slightly different than what it’s looking for, and in others interpreting a question as something completely different. What’s more, some of the questions are out of left-field, and it’s inexplicable why you would be expected to ask them.

The game does offer a hint feature that cuts down on this frustration some, but it’s tied to a difficulty setting you select at the start of the game, and it can’t be changed after that. This setting determines the speed of the time you have to wait in between hints, and waiting between them can feel like it takes forever.

What’s even more regrettable is I’ve already seen this formula done better. In the game Her Story, every interview included a series of keywords that could be used to lead to other interviews, which eliminated almost all of the guesswork. And while you can do a little of that here, for the most part you’ll either be frustratedly guessing at the wording the game will accept, or you’ll be frustratedly waiting for the timer to allow you another hint.

It’s a shame too, because the acting, the story, and the mystery of The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker is very compelling, and if you can put up with the frustrations of the way the game is designed, you still might find it worth your while. But with things as they are, it feels like any recommendation needs to come with a strong caveat.

tl;dr – The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker is an FMV murder mystery where you ask questions of the dead doctor’s patients to track down the killer. The story and acting are top-notch, but the way you ask questions feels unnecessarily frustrating.

Grade: C

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