Summary

• Vice Undercover is set in an alternate 1980s Miami, with a narco-thriller plot involving hackers.
• Players control Vida, an agent infiltrating a hacker crew to take on critical missions within a real-time, count-down format.
• The game offers retro nostalgia with an '80s-inspired operating system, real-life criminal inspirations, and multiple endings to unlock.

Everyone comes away from Gamescom hyped about one game or another, crowing about the best bits they played and sharing favourites with anyone who will listen. While there were plenty of triple-A titles to find, tucked away in a small corner of the Koelnmesse, I found an indie game that quickly became my most anticipated this year: 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Vice Undercover.

Vice Undercover is set in an alternate 1980s where the internet is already widely available to the public. That’s right, a narco-thriller in Miami where you take on the role of an undercover agent digging through the Cartel’s dirty digital records. Cue an ‘80s-esque operat🅷ing system, Amigo OS, with that retro feel I remember from my childhood of clicking around in Windows 95. Only even more retro, as in this timeline, it’s Windows 3.1.

“Imagine Pablo Escobar and other cartels in the ‘80s,” Ancient Machine Studios Co-CEO Cos Lazouras tells me. “What would happen if they had internet access, email, instant messenger, online wire transfers, etc? They could work globally 24 hours a day. It's an alternate 1985 Miami. The only difference is the internet has existed for two years by this point.”

In the world of Vice Undercover, criminal empires and cartels place a lot of importance on early adopters of computers and hackers. One of the biggest syndicates, Vice’s version of the Cali Cartel, has a supercomputer manned by a hacking crew of three guys led by a man called Kevin Astra, who Lazou𝓰ras tells me is inspired by real-life convicted hacker Kevin Mitnick. The computer is manned 24 hours a day in eight-hour shifts, with no two hackers in the building at the same time, as they enter from one door and leave from another. It’s all very hush-hush, as you’d expect from a criminal operation

You take on the role of a Colombian-American agent called Vida, who has figured out the crew’s location and, even more interestingly, has realised that Astra leaves the building for an houꦫr each day. That’s one hour where that super criminal, super interesting supe🌱rcomputer is free. Do you see where this is going?

“They send you in to take over that computer for an hour a day,” Lazouras says. “[You] pretend to be him, continue working for the cartel, and work for the police and do missions. You're trying to take it out from the inside, but there's the moral ambiguity of maintaining that cover means you're doing some serious bad sh*t for the cartel. And it's like, do I do this?”

You’ll spend nearly 70 percent of your time glued to the PC exploring Amigo OS, while around 30 percent of the time, you’ll be exploring the 3D office and interacting with things. There’s real depth to this virtual system and you can’t help but feel like you’re living the dream as some super cool hacker agent extraordinaire. You have to really dig into the programs and information to progress, finding people with sometimes only a scrap of information or a single photo, and your decisions matter. Every little objective you complete makes you feel clever, like you’re a real detective. Think 💖Papers, Please or Need to Know—it’s everything I bloody love in a game.

Rꦚemember Clippy the Paperclip? Well, Vice Undercover has its own little desktop helper. There are multiple programs and features to explore, you can even rock out to some synth-wave music from the pop-up player, which has different skins and 20 licensed tracks that you unlock as you progress. One of the mai🧸n systems you’ll be using is the Delphi database, which features over 500 people that Lazouras describes as a “who’s who of criminal scumbags”, all with photos and dossiers of information.

Lazouras points out one criminal in the database, explaining the photo is actually of Ulf Andersson, the CEO of Ten Chambers and the creator of Payday and GTFO. 𓂃“We get lots of real people and lots of creative people.”

There’s as much depth to the story as there is to their imagined system, with the team taking a lot of inspiration from real events. An example Lazouras gives me is that one of the hacking crew members in the game is Robert Schifreen, the first person in the world to be c෴onvicted of hacking.

“He hacked Prince Philip's BBS and posted as him,” Lazouras tells me. “He was convicted in 1985. He overturned that conviction. When you solve that mission, his arrest warrant, his police interview, and the conviction all get given to you. The original stuff. The whole game is inspired by true events. There's a lot of that kind of Easter egg stuff in there”

There’s a lot of reading involved, though fortunately, there’s a digital notepad in the game to help you keep track of everything you’re doing. “Dialogue and reading is a big part of the game,” Lazouras says. “But so is the pressure of that clock because in an hour, this guy comes back and you've got to get out of there.”

It’s real-time and is constantly counting down on your desktop as you play. There are critical missions that you absolutely must complete in that time, while others are just regular missions that expand the narrative and give addit💦ional clues. If you fail to complete critical missions within the given time, you’re done It’s an instant🅠 game over.

“What you're doing right now is the simplest level of mission, and it's still quite cluttered but you’ve got plenty of time,” Lazouras says. “But once that time pressure is really intensive, and you start getting missions that also have something that's actively going on, then you've got five apps with dozens of things on screen, several people giving you missions at the same time. You've got to decrypt photos, or some of those fields are encrypted. You've got to decrypt them with a decoder, and then to collate all of that information and retain it.”

The team didn’t want players to get “lost in thꦅe important aspects of the story” and that’s why they implemented the in-game notepad as Lazouras emphasises that “it’s i▨mportant that you’re note taking.”

During your one hour masquerading as Astra, you might be tasked with finding the bank account information of someone, but perhaps you only have their surname. So, you scour the database to find the correct criminal. Sometimes you’re given a photo and you have to use the grid-view to see all the faces, only several look particularly similar. You’ll end up having multiple wind👍ows open😼 as you compare photos, analyse notes, and ensure you’re selecting the right bad guy and conveying the correct information to the police.

Other times you’ll be using Chainmail, Vice&🍌rsquo;s version of Gmail, to respond to messages. But you have to talk as you think the criminal hacker would, carefully choosing responses to glean as much informaꦦtion as possible without giving the game away.

During my hands-on, I figured out from a specific greeting that the person I was emailing (or chainmailing) must be from Cuba, and little things like that add up to give clues about who you’re dealing with. Lazouras tells me I have multiple ways to approach the convers♋ation, explaining that certain characters respond to a softer approach whereas others respond to a firmer one.

“This guy in particular gets very angry very quickly if you're arrogant. But the angrier he is, the more info he gives you quickly,” Lazouras tells me. It might seem like “throwaway data” but it’s important stuff that eventually plays out in the narrative. With the responses I chose, I found out Astra has a drug problem. Had I gone the other way, Lazouras says I would have learned about Astra’s gambling problem. Small details like this add up to the bigger picture of figuring out what’s happening and how to act.

There are multiple endings to unlock, with Lazouras revealing—despite laughing that he shouldn’t— there is a playable secret post-credit mission, hinting “If you don't stay until the end of the credits, you're not going to find everything.”

“The whole game is just one massive twist,” Lazouras teases. “It's really based on the research we did, which is the backdrop of the ‘80s drug wars in Miami where the line between who the good guys and who the bad guys were was completely all over the place. So much police corruption. Politicians were using it for benefit. Not every crime member was pure evil. Everyone in the game has an agenda, and it slowly unfolds. The narrative is the driving force.”

Vice Undercover is one single game, but it’s portrayed as a box set of a TV show. The training episode is ‘The Pilot’, and there are five seasons total. The first three seasons feature six in-game days that run from Monday to Friday, the fourth season has four days, and then Lazouras tells me the days in the two-part series finale are “bigger than the first two chapters of the game.” Lazouras promises that it’s got a decent playtime to it, explaining, “It's a minimum 20-hour playthrough. And it's not developer bullsh*t 20 hours. You physically cannot get through it in less than that.”

Before I had even left my session with Vice Undercover 𒊎I was asking when I could get my hands on it next. When was it launching? When would a demo be available? I just wanted more time checking out this incredible world and exciting ‘80s inspired system. Fortunately, we don’t have to wait too long as It’s launching at the end of this year. You can check out more about Vice Undercover and .