Conspiracy!

boring, bad, and not worth it. i wanted to try out one of their games before picking up ratline, just to see if i like the studio. big mistake on my part, because this game sucked. no subtitles or transcripts, so if you think the voice actors are annoying af to listen to or, gods forbid, you're some flavor of deaf, hard of hearing, auditory processing issues, or even just can't play audio, well good luck with that, because the game provides no accommodations. it also feels more than a little tasteless to make a game blaming "the libs" like this during a huge resurgence of global fascism but that's just as a side note.

It's a cheap game for sure, but I overall didn't really find the detective work engaging or meaningful. To start things off, you're missing initial context about a lot of things that make the first set almost guesswork. A QoL that is missing but also very important was the lack of a voice transcript. It was difficult to understand what was being said. After some time once I got the hang out of it, most of the detective work boiled down to finding a keyword and googling the date to the keyword. Some of the events quoted here even happened for multiple dates. Overall, it's short and cheap, but I left finishing it feeling I could have spent my time better elsewhere.

I did not like this game at all. The conspiracy is illogical and badly made and the political undertones made me deeply uncomfortable.

A somewhat minimal experience for a very minimal price. Conspiracy can be considered an extremely stripped down version of the investigation genre - as you can see, it can be completed in less than a hour, and probably two if you're really struggling. The avenues of investigation are fairly minimalistic, with a collection of short documents and a handful of audio tapes to help you establish a timeline of events concerning the game's plots. Really, I found myself very uninvested in what was going on - most of the puzzle solving isn't really building a sequence of events, but matching dates and timestamps up with the vague names provided, and sorting them into place. I also find it difficult to get attached to the campy portrayal of conspiracy culture, which had already become quickly dated in the aftermath of the 2020 election, and even more bitter now that the absurd ending to the game is just kind of how the entire federal government behaves now. Still - it's only a dollar! I'm not gonna bother giving a thumbs down for a dollar. Every studio's gotta start from somewhere, and for every Conspiracy, there's the potential for a Ratline a few years down the road.

options menu is horrible, can't even open properly without either missing half the screen or barely able to read

Eh. Not a big fan of how the clues are presented, many of the puzzles are solved the same way (google What year is X date on a saturday). The idea of piecing together a Q-anon style conspiracy would have been interesting if they didn't try to lean so heavily onto real events and ultimately make a cheap seeming game. It's a shame because the voice acting was very solid and I enjoyed scrubbing conspiracy theory podcasts for "clues" but overall a poor attempt to force actual Qanon beliefs onto Obra dinn lite gameplay. Can be beaten in 1-2 hours.