When the chips are down, can you trust anyone?
How far are you willing to go to conceal the truth? Whom will you betray to save your skin?
In a sense, these are the questions that Deceit aims to answer by throwing you into a world that’s rife with uncertainty, desperation, and endless twists and turns.
In this Deceit game review, we’ll walk you through everything there is to know about the FPS-style dark horror game from its premise to the core features and visual design.
By the end, you’ll be equipped to decide if Deceit is worth your time or just another title with lots of flair and no substance.
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Verdict
Out Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️✩
There are many multiplayer games based on the kill-or-be-killed format but few execute it as brilliantly as Deceit does. The fusion of thinly-veiled hostility, suspicion-filled collaboration, underhanded deception, and a scramble for survival makes it exciting to play.
Pros
- It’s free to play.
- It requires a lot of communication and collaboration between players.
- The game offers a lot of intrigue and allows you to bring your own styles and strategies to the action.
Cons
- Language barriers can hinder gameplay when facing randomly selected players from different corners of the globe.
- You need a powerful laptop to play the game at a decent framerate.
What is the Deceit Game about?
Deceit is a multiplayer survival-themed first-person shooter horror game published by World Makers and released in March 2017.
It requires a combination of skill, collaboration, and cunning to stay alive and fulfill your mission as dictated by your role in the game.
Deceit is a story-driven game with a simple premise: six people wake up to discover that they have been kidnapped and trapped in an asylum by a mysterious doctor known as the Game Master.
To find ways to escape, you and the other five players must work together to solve the Game Master’s challenges and make it through the three zones without dying.
The catch is that two of the players have been infected with a dangerous virus that causes them to mutate into bloodthirsty monsters who will try to kill the four innocents to keep them from escaping.
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That’s not all though. You see, no one knows who the infected players are except the players themselves. So everyone is suspicious of everyone else and looking for signs that might tell them which of their fellow survivors is the enemy amongst them.
If you’re infected you have to deceive, lie, and betray other players to hide your secret. You have to slow down the innocents and shift the suspicion to them so they get killed instead of you.
In between all of this, you’ll be sneaking around to find and discreetly drink from the blood bags scattered around the building to help you gain power and complete your transition when the lights die out,
As an innocent, you’re not off the hook because you’re the only one who knows for sure that you’re innocent.
So, you’ll have to do your best to not draw extra attention or suspicion to yourself and try to convince others that you’ve not been infected or you’ll be dead.
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This is in addition to the main quest where you have to gather as many resources to protect and defend yourself before the asylum goes dark and the infected are free to transform into unstoppable beasts.
All of this creates the perfect breeding ground for tensions and conflicts which help make Deceit a very captivating and fulfilling game.
Are you going to form alliances and risk betrayal or fight against the other players to secure ownership of items that can help you survive the potential terror attack?
Deceit is just deeply satisfying on so many levels. You get the thrill of fast-paced combat with the mental stimulation of strategic gameplay, and the terrifying uncertainty that accompanies elaborate mind games,
As if that’s not enough, Deceit is free to play. However, you can choose to purchase optional content and special customization features to show support for the developers.
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Gameplay and features
What makes Deceit brilliant is that there is no way to tell the good guys from the bad guys unless they transform or you catch them drinking blood.
You know somebody is coming for you, you just don’t know who or when, but you have to keep going regardless.
Unlike most other action games where skill is the most valuable currency, success in Deceit is based on your ability to work well with others and your powers of manipulation more than anything else.
The Deceit game has three levels and each has two phases: light and darkness. When the lights are on, players can see each other and move about freely to gather resources or sabotage others.
Anyone who is suspected of being infected can be shot by another player but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re out of the game.
The shooter has to convince two other players that they’ve been infected so they can vote them out by shooting them too.
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If they don’t get voted out, they will respawn and rejoin the game, which as you can imagine, takes the awkwardness and tension to a whole new level.
Unfortunately for the innocents, they can’t go about killing anyone they suspect of being infected because if they wipe off the innocents, the game automatically ends. The infected get to win without transforming.
Similarly, the innocents can win early on if they can correctly guess who the infected players are and take them out before the lights are turned off.
Once the lights go out, the infected will have more freedom to roam about, double their powers, or transform and go on a killing spree to take as many innocents as possible. No players can be voted out during the blackout phase.
What I love about Deceit’s gameplay is that there are so many variables that you never know how your choices will impact the outcome.
This gives the game an amazing replay value because you’ll be faced with a unique set of motivations, decisions, and shadiness in every game.
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As you’d expect, there are many features in Deceit that you can leverage to increase your chances of winning.
You can collect weapons like shotguns and lethal injections which can be used to seriously harm or effectively kill other players depending on whether they’re in human or beast form.
Deceit also has a bunch of reconnaissance and defensive tools that will come in handy as you make your way through the asylum. They include:
- Camera – The flash from this helps to slow down terrors during blackouts because light hurts them.
- Traps – Briefly incapacitates any monster that walks over it.
- Antidote – Used to revive a player that’s been downed by a terror.
- Torch – This allows you to keep terrors stunned for longer.
- Tracker – This lets you track another player through the walls for up to a minute, day and night.
- Body armor – Helps increase your health and strength
- Inspection kit – You can use this to scan other players to determine whether they are infected or not.
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Additionally, the Deceit game gives users five different maps or locations to choose from.
You can set the game in an Asylum, Forest, Manor, Lumberyard, or the Arctic, so you’re free to switch things up from game to game and enjoy the different challenges that each map has to offer.
Regardless of where you choose to spawn or whether you’re playing with strangers or your very best friends, your trust and strengths will be tested. You’ll probably even succumb to paranoia and go from working together to actively hindering each other.
It is this constant state of anxiety, alertness, and distrust that makes Deceit an unforgettable gaming experience.
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Controls and communications
The control framework for Deceit is on par with expectations for an FPS game. It feels logical and natural so it’s easy for you to perform different actions like shooting at players, walking around, or grabbing objects.
To communicate with other players, you can text, use voice chats if you have a microphone, or use character voice commands.
Unfortunately, if you’re playing the game solo with random players across the world, communication can be frustrating because of language barriers.
You have little chance of convincing a Chinese or Russian player, for example, that you’re on their side if neither of you understands what the other is saying.
What this means is that you end up missing out on the tense combat scenes, spontaneous interrogations, alliance formations, and other human interactions that add color and drama to the game.
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Graphics and visuals
In terms of appearance, Deceit’s visuals don’t feel very new or extraordinary. If you’ve seen The Thing or any of the movies in the Saw franchise, the setting will probably feel familiar but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
The graphics are good enough to immerse you in the world it’s building even if the characters aren’t hyper-realistic.
The environment and atmosphere effectively evoke a sense of horror and apprehension that inspires chaos and messes with players’ minds, pushing them to hurt and kill each other.
If you’re a huge fan of blood and gore, you’ll not get much satisfaction from Deceit in this area because the violent imagery isn’t very graphic. However, the voice acting and audio design compensate for this and will likely make you squirm in your seat.
Also, some spaces in the maps are useless because nothing happens there, but the refined pacing and timing of the different levels and phases easily make up for this.
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Wrapping It Up
Deceit may not be perfect but it comes close. There’s a lot to love about the game, but best of all is how much it puts your detective skills and capacity for manipulation and betrayal to the test.
The storyline on its own is fresh and engaging and when you combine that with the real-life tensions that accompany the gameplay, the results are explosive, unforgettable, and often hard to live down.
It’s a fun and creative game that you and your friends will surely get a kick out of, and it will make you question how well you really know each other again and again.