Decade Review

We all have this fantasy of going back in time to right some wrongs and save the world, don't we? Some righteous wish to prevent a tragedy or do one big thing that can ripple out into eternity. YetDecade, a narrative title from solo-developer and publisher Last Piscean, asks whether or not you’re willing to send children to the past for the sake of the world, all while you sit back in safety.

You, playing as the 17-year-old Wik, have managed to escape world-ending metallic rains and worm your way into a secret bunker with three children: a determined eight-year-old girl, Mons; a rambunctious nine-year-old boy, Jag; and a sensitive 11-year-old girl, Ula. Represented by the colours red, blue, and yellow, respectively, these three are the ones who must travel back in time for 10 years at a time to learn about the past and attempt to correct it for a better future.

Each child has their own strengths and weaknesses, and they can acquire new personality traits through their time in the past as well as through optional conversations you can have with them in the present. No matter what, though, they will get older and older until, quickly, they stop being children, and eventually, if you can’t find a future to be happy with, they don’t make it back at all.

Despite how much these children are the ones travelling through time, you, as Wik, never get to see or experience the past firsthand. All you see is a grand timeline showing every major period you are aware of, boxes featuring information about the ever-important children, an inventory featuring all that they’ve brought back with them, and the game’s settings. It’s a simple setup, but it works nicely. The typical gameplay loop here sees you sending a child back in time to explore and learn about a given decade, asking them about it, receiving special items from the past, and then either sending them or another child back to accomplish a task in that time period.

Over time, you can get a sense for how to influence the past, though it typically involves closely reading what your kids tell you about each era, noting what tools you can send them back with, and deciding who is best suited to your chosen task. These can range from killing someone, taking a specific artefact from the period, to even promoting an ideology. Sometimes, the answer will be relatively simple, like how you might decide to send your most determined child back with a sniper rifle to murder the person who popularised a destructive philosophy, but it isn’t always so easy to puzzle out.

Decade requires a heavy amount of close reading to manoeuvre the more difficult timeline puzzles; beyond that, you’ll get the most out of your experience by focusing on the conversations with your children and reading the materials they obtain. For the majority of the game, you’re facing walls of text on a variety of interesting — if occasionally repetitive — subjects.

Now, I am an avid reader myself, but it still felt overwhelming on occasion, especially when I was getting frustrated with figuring out what to do next. This isn’t helped by the fact that Decade doesn’t exactly have any robust vocal performances, with only a handful of almost understandable gibberish playing along with the dialogue. This doesn’t have to be an issue per se, but it’s definitely something you have to prepare yourself for: Decade wants you to take your time and pay attention to what it has to say.

That being said, “what it has to say” is a little hard to parse in places. The game explores a variety of warring philosophies that can each lead the world to differing flavours of devastation, and it assigns each ideology a unique name. However, with a handful of exceptions, I found it difficult to truly associate the proper philosophy with their names, to the point where I got overwhelmed and had to reread a lot of descriptions to understand the powers at play. It definitely gets easier with more experience, but a glossary of these terms explained more simply may have been helpful.

Thankfully, one of the biggest ways the game explores these ideas is also its most straightforward: the endings. I’m going to offer a small amount of spoilers when discussing them in these next two paragraphs, but only so far as describing one of the sillier bad endings as an example.

There are around 20 different ones to go for, with most of them being nominally bad and all of them represented in stunning Full Motion Video, or FMV. There are these odd colouring effects that blur the videos somewhat, but this works nicely with the futuristic style Decade is going for and it doesn’t make the FMV cutscenes any harder to understand. After all, they encapsulate the basic ideas of the route the current timeline is on and attempt to show you what life is like under a given philosophy.

Some of these can be a little corny, like one where shady businessmen turn a bunch of women into mind-controlling Sirens that basically take over everything, but others provide a lot of room for thought. I don’t wish to spoil these very much, but my favourites were the ones that called into question whether or not they were truly “bad” endings after all, or that provided a reasoning behind why you would decide to choose that world, knowing everything. However, the fact that they can run the gamut between these extremes is a major plus in and of itself: there’s something to love here, whether you want to explore the catharsis of apocalypse, laugh along with a somewhat silly outcome, or find yourself considering whether you can accept a given kind of world.

Another element of Decade I couldn’t help but find charming is how you can unlock different themes for each philosophy you learn about. These come with new backgrounds for your menus, background music, and sound effects. The Nerolian theme looked pop art-esque and very pleasing on the eyes, and Cedarism has a fine, stately aura to it, but Bergamism, with its spooky, thoughtful music and simple, dark background, was my personal favourite.

These themes do help a bit with figuring out what each philosophy is about, but sometimes, this can go a little far. Roughly a quarter of the themes make reading some options more taxing by adding too much visual noise and some of the musical or sound effect choices can be distracting as well. One in particular I feel I should note is Lavenderism, which provides a wide variety of sensual, explicit whispers. While this is a perfect encapsulation of their brand of extreme hedonism, it made focusing on reading rather difficult.

I’m honestly not too sure where I stand on Decade. On the one hand, I really enjoyed the conversations with the main trio and seeing how they evolve over time. On the other hand, I found myself getting frustrated over what I was meant to do and overwhelmed by a wide range of philosophies. Back on the first hand, the game has a keen sense of style that works well with the overall simple mechanics and translates into entertaining endings. But then on that second hand again, that same style can get out of hand to an almost uncomfortable degree. On a third hand that has since been excised, I ran into a fair few bugs that crashed the game, but thankfully, these errors were quickly removed.

In the end, I suppose you’ll get as much out of Decade as you put into it, and I’m sure that many people will be able to have deeply engaging experiences with the game, but it’s also a little too easy to bounce off of it to recommend it on a wide scale. If it tickles your fancy, you should definitely check it out. I know I’ll still be thinking about it for a while to come.