The game consists entirely of conversations that take place in your psychotherapy office, where you've taken over for the titular doctor. It quickly becomes apparent that there's some seriously Lovecraftian stuff going on, which is awesome but not what make this game incredible.
You see, I enjoy first-person action-RPG's like the new Fallout and Elder Scrolls games, and immersive sims like Deus Ex. But I've never found a computer RPG whose dialog wasn't boring as hell, no matter how good the story and characters were. You just click through all of your options, here every single response programmed into the NPC, and move on.
Conversation in computer RPGs isn't challenging. It's not even really a game most of the time; more like a cutscene with a veneer of interactivity.
What makes Dr. Dekker so incredible is that all the conversations are done text adventure style. That means you don't get shown a list of things you can say to the other person; instead there's a massive number of pre-determined things you can say, but they're hidden from you. You type something in, and if what you typed is close to one of those secret lines (mainly if it contains a keyword, I think) you say that thing and get a response.
There's a massive number of dialogue options programmed into the game, but you have to figure them out. There's an option to give you hints for the main ones that you need to advance through the game, but that's it. I ended up finding maybe 70% of them.
All of a sudden, dialogue actually feels like I'm playing a game rather than being walked through a story.
It brings me back to the days of playing games like Zork and The Lurking Horror, (when I discovered them in the 2000's that is; I'm not that old) having to figure out what my options were rather than picking from a limited menu. Can I jump off the roof? Oh shit, guess I can; time to start a new game.
After text adventures gave way to more graphically-impressive formats, computer games lost a lot of their flexibility. With regards to physical actions, a lot of that flexibility has com back over the years, at least in immersive sims like System Shock and Deus Ex.
But dialogue? The conversation mechanics of computer games are still stuck in the dark ages. And they don't need to be. Here's how they can get better.
First, if you've never played text adventures before, try The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker, or try Zork or Spider and Web for free in your browser. For how low-tech they are, it's pretty amazing what you can do in them.
As for modern RPGs...they could incorporate this style of interaction, at least on their conversation subsystems. Imagine if, in the next Fallout game, conversation worked like this:
You start a conversation with a shopkeeper. The only options shown are "What do you have in stock" and "Goodbye." But you know there's more to talk about– this town has been getting raided by bandits. So you hold down a button on your controller and say into your microphone "What's going on with the bandits?"
That's not exactly what's programmed into the game, but the voice recognition software recognizes that it's close to something that is. A new conversation option appears for you to select: "What can you tell me about the bandits?"
Now imagine if every NPC you could talk to had secret dialogue options like that– sometimes dozen of them. The only options you'd be given would be super obvious ones like ending the conversation, and maybe asking shopkeepers what they're selling. Everything else you'd have to figure out.
Tabletop RPGs have the same issue a lot of the time. Take 5E for instance– it touts "social" as one of the three pillars of the game, alongside exploration and combat. Except...you're almost never allowed to fail at social challenges. You role-play them, but mostly just for fun, and the outcomes only vary within a small range. Just like computer RPGs.
Social interaction should be important, in both computer and tabletop games. But that means it has to be challenging, there have to be options that you might either miss or fail to execute properly when you do uncover them, and it has to be possible to fail.
A lot of the OSR– if not the mainstream RPG scene– is pretty good at doing this already. But computer games? They don't even try, and they should.
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