LogFAQs > #933399107

#5





Years of release: Oh, god, hahaha. Like, 2013-present (PC early access)? I picked it up in 2016 and it came out on Steam early access in 2018 but it's still not finished
Beaten?: N/A

It's SpyParty! The best new eSport you've never heard of!

SpyParty is a deception game that is played 1v1 between two human players. In it, one player takes the role of the 'spy' at a fancy party full of AI-controlled guests - the human player infiltrates this party, milling about, drinking and schmoozing with other guests, pretending to be an AI themselves. The other player, the 'sniper', must watch the party carefully, trying to pick out the spy in the group - they have only one bullet, and they have to pick the spy correctly, or they lose. The twist is that the spy has objectives they must complete to win - they have to do small, subtle things such as quickly planting a bug on someone unseen, stealing a statue and putting a different one in its place, taking a microfilm out of a book, getting in contact with a double agent, etc. All of these actions are things only the spy can do, and the sniper has to watch this busy party to find the person trying to complete these objectives right in plain sight before they complete all their objectives.

I love deception games - games like Mafia and Resistance that are all about hiding in plain sight, trying to sneak things past the other player or players undetected. While those are social deception games, in which you have to talk and lie your way through the game, this is something more akin to a puzzle game, in which you have to move around at the party and get the other player to think that you aren't the human-controlled character, then sneakily do something right under their noses when they're not looking. Both players have an intense challenge in front of them - the spy has to figure out exactly when the sniper won't be looking or what they're not paying attention to to try to complete a mission, and the sniper has to be tracking everything at the party carefully, figuring out who could be suspicious, who possibly has missions completed, and not make the wrong shot.

I was going to say there is no gaming experience anything like this, but there is one on my list - Game & Wario's Fruit, which is like a heavily simplified version of this game. This is a very grown-up version of Fruit, several orders of magnitude more complicated - Fruit is a game you play for an hour with friends for fun, SpyParty is a game that it takes hundreds, if not thousands, of hours to master. There are so many subtle little things to figure out in this game, so many ways as the spy that you can fool the sniper, so many ways as the sniper to better lock down your ability to catch the spy in the act.

This game has been in development for over 10 years now, and in public beta for about 7 years, and I think it'll probably be released for real sometime in the next 2-3 years or so, but I'm counting this as a 10's game because it's been in a highly playable and mostly polished state since about 2016 or so, which is when I picked it up. The detail that's put into the game by the dev, Chris Hecker, is impressive, as he's basically developing this game as a labor of love and has invested a lot of time into fine-tuning the game exactly the way he wants it instead of rushing it out the door.

At first, it seemed like a fun little game, but once I found out about the competitive SpyParty community in 2018, I realized just the insane depth of this game - people spend time researching the habits of other players and attempt to counter their play specifically, and they know the game inside and out, utilizing tricks and methods that I didn't even know existed until I came around to their streams. It really opened up a whole new world to me and I've been kind of off-and-on obsessed about improving my play ever since, although that comes with long periods of burnout where I just can't see myself improving that much anymore past a certain ceiling. Still, I'm involved in the community and have done streams of competitive games from time to time - this game is just fascinating to watch be played, the experts at this game are so good at disguising their actions and so good at spotting spies doing things and making the correct shot. I'm never at a loss for things to talk about and I could commentate over these games for hours.

It's hard for me to recommend this game to other people, because you have to find human partners to play with, and it's hard to play with people who don't have the same skill level as you. If you do pick it up, I recommend as much as possible picking it up with someone else and learning the game together - but if that's not possible, and this seems like it's up your alley anyway, give it a try. It's really one of the most interesting competitive experiences I've ever experienced in a video game, and I don't think that my writeup here can do justice to how much depth there is. I ended up not writing about this one for a day because I couldn't figure out how to start describing why I love it so much. I took like a year off between finding this game for the first time and coming back to it and really trying to hone my skills, and during that year, I just couldn't stop thinking about the game concept here; there's so much about the game mechanics that made me come back and think "wow, SpyParty is such a cleverly designed game." It's still a pretty small community of players at the moment, but I do hope that more people pick this one up.