Save Koch

Review

Well, your day started brilliantly! All your illegal operations are cranking up revenue like never before. On the other hand, the night was a bit of a let-down. Sure, it was like all the other evenings where you sit down on your expensive sofa with a glass of spirits in one hand and the best cigar in the other, smiling at the achievement of being the biggest and strongest kingpin in town. But that feeling evaporated quickly when several soldiers, sent by one of your associates, arrived and took you to a safe house. That’s right, mister Jeffrey Koch, the tough Kingpin in town has a contract on his head, and he has only seven days to find out who ordered this contract, and who within your organisation is helping him. It’s time to save Koch!

Save Koch is a strategy/choice matters game developed by Wooden Monkeys and published by BigGame on the Steam platform on the 18^th April 2019. You’ll be playing Jeffrey, and your goal is to find the mastermind who wants you dead, as well as the mole who is helping him or her.

The game starts with a telephone conversation between you and the associate who sent the soldiers to snatch you away, and you’ll have to make a few choices straight away.  Once that’s done, you’ll move onto the next day, with a total of six days to find the culprits.

From here, you’ll be in your office, with a lot of things going on every single day to manage and stay alive. Each day will take around 20 minutes of play time, and you’ll be going back and forth between three different screens.

The main screen is the office where you’ll be able to take and make phone calls; this is where you’ll have to choose carefully how you want these discussions to go, and depending on your choices you may find valuable information.

The second screen is the work tablet, which is a map of the town where events will occur during each day. These incidents will pop up as the day goes by and they vary from assault, surveillance, crime scenes and a few others. You can investigate these events by sending one of your associates to that location. Make sure to select the associate who has some knowledge of a specific situation. For example, it would be wise to send a detective to a crime scene rather than a group soldier. You’ll have far more success in finding relevant information, and they will accomplish the job faster as well.  The other thing to keep in mind is that you only have four associates to use on this screen, but incidents will be popping up left, right and centre. On top of that, your phone will ring almost every few hours to make the juggling even harder. And to put some cream on the cake, you might even lose a few of your associates on jobs you send them to.

The third screen is the electronic board; here you’ll find a display of the details pertaining to each of the people about whom you’ve discovered information. It is essential to know that new people will be added to the board as you find out about them, either by investigating events in the city or talking to them on the phone (if they call you, of course). Then their pictures will be on the board and you will be required to find seven clues for each of them so you can discover who is the mastermind and who is the mole. And of course, all the information will be found by investigating and making phone calls during each day. It’s frantic, to say the least.

As you progress through the week and think you have enough evidence to know who the culprits are, you can order a hit on both the mastermind and the mole, but think twice before doing so, as you might be wrong and end up dying mid-week (as I did several times by sticking my snout into the business of the wrong people).   

I really enjoyed the cyberpunk environment and the characters, which are mostly half-human and half-animal.

Excellent graphics, and the dialogue is pretty good too.  There are several ways to end Jeffrey Koch’s life, which is fun. It is quite a fast gameplay, which I was surprised to discover when I played my first couple of games. It would be an idea to have a pause option so you can take your time to evaluate the information retrieved by your associates. I guess it is done on purpose as you begin to understand how the game works and feel the rush to make a quick decision pretty much on all situations as the clock keeps ticking.