A special thanks to Petit Depotto for the review code.
You may have heard of Gnosia, a 2019 game that’s just released on Nintendo Switch. It’s been labelled as the social deduction hit Among Us in the form of a dark visual novel like Zero Time Escape or Danganronpa, but that’s not quite true. I do think the comparisons to games like Zero Time Escape are fair, but with Among Us? I’m not so sure. Now, these comparisons are not unfounded. The main gameplay loop of Gnosia involves discussions amongst a group of refugees on a spaceship as they try to figure out who amongst them is actually a Gnosia, an imposter whose goal is to make all the other players disappear. The setting, and your goal being to either find who is sus or be the one who is sus, are why these comparisons have been made. But these are the only comparisons between the two.
Gnosia doesn’t have tasks to complete like Among Us does, and the only way the player can win is by discovering who the Gnosia is and putting them into cold sleep. Sometimes there are even multiple imposters at once. Likewise, as Gnosia, the only way to win is to have the number of crew match the amount of the Gnosia currently in play but you can only get rid of the crew one at a time, and there is always a discussion inbetween.
A better comparison would be games like Mafia or Werewolf, classic games that got Among Us comparisons of their own (despite coming first). Just like those games, there are roles outside of the Gnosia and Crew that can affect gameplay. Doctors can inspect those in Cold Sleep to figure out if they were infected or not; the engineer can inspect those outside of Cold Sleep for the same thing. The Guardian Angel can protect one person every night from death, while the AC Follower is a crew member who wins only if the Gnosia does, but has no idea who the Gnosia are and so acts as a bit of wild card, throwing a wrench into the mix. There are even more roles than these, and the game encourages you to try them all out.
You can choose which role you want to play at the start of each game (called a “loop” in-universe), and you can assign how many crew there will be and how many Gnosia are hiding within them. There is a lot of choice here, and it allows for experimentation. Want to have a game with the max amount of Gnosia and no doctors or engineers to support the crew? You can. Likewise, you can have a game with a max crew and only a single Gnosia, playing mind games to trick your foes into turning on each other like some kind of galaxy brain anime villain.
How do you trick your opponents though? The fundamental difference between Gnosia and Mafia is that the latter is a multiplayer only game done with friends, This game is exclusively single-player, done against AI. It might feel this defeats the purpose of games of this style, but in practice it makes the game feel very different, for better and sometimes for worse. Figuring out how the AI works and how to best play it can be really satisfying, but figuring out yourself who is and isn’t an imposter, and trying to convey your reasoning to your computer allies (almost always being suspected yourself in the process) can be more frustrating that not.
The way the AI works is by reacting to your actions in the game’s daily discussions. Over five turns, everyone argues who they think is and isn’t sus. They form alliances with one another, back up or argue against each other’s claims, and then eventually vote on who they think is most likely Gnosia. But there are a lot of factors in play for the game decide who it thinks is coming off as a suspicious character. If the player stays silent for too long, they’ll be called out on it, and they’ll get accused when they talk to much, too. Make too many bold claims or flip-flop on your opinions too frequently, and the AI will start to suspect you even more.
There are special actions that can help change the tide of battle. Special techniques like regret may make more of the crew defend you. Directly accusing someone of being a definite enemy may force the AI to admit themselves they are Gnosia. To unlock these, the player levels up like in an RPG and assigns points to stats to make a character that fits their strategy. I would advise trying to be as even as possible. At the start of the game. I thought it would be funny to go all in on Logic (the ultimate power of prosecutors), and this made me wonderfully calculated; it made it easier to deduce who was Gnosia. Too bad I was so uncharismatic and repellent that none of my crew liked me or listened to me. And when I was Gnosia, I was so unlikeable that everyone just voted me off on the first turn anyway. So rude.
You can make the crew warm up to you more by visiting them in the nights after discussions, and in those times special events might occur. You make alliances, characters give you theories on who they think is sus (and may even lie to you so you attack your own side), and open up about their backstories in both comedic and heart wrenching ways. And it’s this that is the true point of the game. The end goal is to fill out your notebook with each of the 14 crew members’ backstories and learn who they really are as people. After all, this game is a visual novel.
And that’s really the crux of it all. While the main gameplay is just a solo journey through Mafia, the main focus is the story and the characters. Like a surprisingly large number of recent works, you’re stuck in a Groundhog Day scenario, experiencing loops of the same few days but changing every time. Sometimes you are just a crew member, and sometimes you’re infected with Gnosia. Sometimes there are only five crew members on board; other times it’s 13. You might be on Guard Duty or playing the doctor.
Experiencing these different loops and how the story and characters change based on the scenario is the most appealing part of the game. When you accidentally stumble across a new event, it’s shocking and memorable, and thanks to the game’s structure the story doesn’t feel linear. You are approaching everything at your own pace and in your own way, which is honestly very refreshing for a visual novel. It’s like a chose your own adventure game book, but with a cast of incredibly likeable and varied sci-fi characters. You have the stuck-up Raqio, who’s always looking down on people, the highly skilled but timid Gina, and my boy Shigemichi, a retro video game collector who looks like a stereotypical grey alien but swears he is definitely human (or at least more human than Otome, the actual Dolphin who drives around in a little pod on wheels). You have a fun crew here to learn about – and, at times, kill – over and over and over again.
In the end, Gnosia accomplishes what all great games manage to do and kept me interested in playing. It’s very rare that I actually feel compelled to come back and keep playing a game over and over again for hours on end, never getting bored or burnt out in the process. I had an absolute blast playing this game, and it’s certainly one of the better visual novels I have played in recent memory. For fans of visual novels and games like Zero Time Escape, there is plenty to love here. And if you are not a big fan of visual novels but enjoy games with stories and games like Mafia or Among Us then I reckon you will also enjoy the discussions and fights to survive. For whatever loop you decide to take, just remember that there is always an imposter among us, and in this case it is called Gnosia.
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