Take a tour into the demented minds of Doctor Dekker’s patients and try to find out which one is responsible for his death! Learn more in our The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker review!

 

The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker – Launch Trailer | PS4

YOU are a psychiatrist, trying to solve a murder whilst treating the unusual patients of the recently deceased Doctor Dekker. Ask any questions and collect the evidence as you uncover the identity of the randomly generated murderer whilst trying to figure out the chaos that was left behind.

The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker is a Lovecraftian FMV murder mystery, which gives players full freedom to question suspects by typing their own questions or by picking from a predetermined list.

They’ll have questions for you too but be careful what you say. Your words will determine their eventual fates, and your own!

FMV – 1600+ full screen HD video responses.
RANDOM MURDERER – Chosen at the start of the game to combat spoilers.
FREE TEXT INPUT – Ask whatever you want, type questions, phrases or just keywords.
SUGGESTED QUESTIONS – An additional question system optimised for console.
MULTIPLE ENDINGS – Find out whodunit with 6 main suspects and 5 side-quests.

The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker is a new FMV game on PS4. The game itself gave me vibes of Her Story, a PC indie game where you use keywords to search through video interviews from the police to try to understand what happened. I really loved playing it as it was new and interesting, and it rightfully received critical praise. The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker uses a similar mechanic but instead of reviewing video footage, you are a new psychiatrist interviewing the patients of the titular Doctor Dekker, and you can ask your own questions or select from the available options. It’s a really neat mechanic that makes for a fun game.

The game has six different levels of difficulty ranging from Easy to Insane. When playing in Easy the game provides you with questions to ask and helps to guide you through the experience from a storytelling perspective – when you move the needle to insane no hints or formulated questions are given. The different levels in-between adjust these gameplay elements accordingly., and it’s a great system that allows you to learn the basics during your first playthrough so that you can increase the difficulty in subsequent runs until you eventually take on the insane setting.

The gameplay is simple really since you switch between the available patients and ask them questions as you attempot to solve how Doctor Dekker was murdered. It really comes down to how you ask the questions though since each patient has a different story and different personality quirks. For example, one patient blacks out and wakes up on the beach naked every morning, while another one thinks they get an extra hour at the end of the day to do anything. Some will seem crazy right from the start, while others you will need to interview for a bit longer before his/her true personality shines through.

As this is a full motion video (FMV) game, one of the most important things is the acting of the people in front of they camera, and boy have we come along way from Sewer Shark and Night Trap on the Sega CD! The game’s actors are great and put a lot of effort into portraying their characters. I really liked the ones that had to hide there craziness and exposed it throughout the exploration questions. This being a full motion video rendered at 1080p means that everything looks great on the screen as you play. A ton of footage was recorded for the many branching paths in each conversation, and the game looks great from start to finish.

The game has a Platinum trophy that isn’t so hard to get, but that will take some time to unlock, especially since there’s one trophy that requires you to ask 1,000 questions, as well as another one that asks that you play the game for at least eight hours in total. So as long as you do several runs for the game and ask a ton of questions, you’ll eventually unlock a new Platinum trophy for your collection.

Final Thoughts

I really liked The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker. I love adventure games and this FMV murder mystery had something new to offer on PlayStation 4. The actors did a great job in portraying the crazy patients you interview during each run, and the way the murder is randomized for each run will keep you guessing who killed Doctor Dekker, so every new run you do will feel very different.

Disclaimer
This The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker trailer review is based on a PlayStation 4 copy provided by Wales Interactive.