Earlier this week, one of my industry peers James Bentley (they’re over at that other site about PC games, GamerPCs I think it’s called) put out a video essay titled “I Can Guarantee You This Game is Going to be Underrated”. Trusting in James as a critic of varied and interesting taste, I clicked through and found that yeah, they’re right, it probably will be. However, I also get to write about indie PC games for a living, so I’d like to do my part in telling you about this strange, point-and-click/ visual novel called Decade.
I don’t think Decade is an easy, or perhaps comfortable game to describe, given its heavy themes. The game follows four children, specifically the four last children on the entire planet, the only survivors after metallic rain killing almost everyone else, the rest of them subsequently killing each other. Somehow these kids manage to get a time machine working, with three of them able to travel back 10 years to try and save the world.
Watch on YouTube
The thing is, time travel or not, aging comes for us all, and these children do in fact grow older across those 10 years. While in the past, they can “investigate documents, technologies, and artefacts to understand history”, all the while trying to make decisions that can lead you into several different futures. This, to put it plainly, is a concept that will likely continue to keep me up at night.
How much guilt should I feel for leading these children towards a future that might not even be liveable? Will I waste their years away in doing so? Do they get to have a future? These are questions I’m yet to answer myself through playing the game, but I’d like to, and it would be nice if you were interested in trying to do the same.
Developer Last Piscean worked on this solo after losing their job, and they still haven’t managed to find one, and with the game releasing today (with a discount that makes it the price of two cups of coffee on Steam), there’s no better time to check it out than now.