This is like some kind of Ghost in the Shell Suicide Squad and I am here for it.

I chased after the Death Heads gang across something like five chapters; through a synthetic meat factory, power plant, and abandonded mall. I thought as I approached Death Head HQ that I was approaching the finale of the game. But slowly I realized I was only about halfway through. I felt nowhere close to finding the missing police officers I was sent to find. Nowhere near understanding why I was being confronted by mutant dogs ready to go Resident Evil on me.

The team at D.C. True wanted to make an accurate presidency simulator and they did, complete with triggering a total global crisis by just saying the word “nuclear” to the Soviet Union. Reviews of this game from the ’90s criticize it for being boring and it is. Part of the problem is that you are inundated with messages, ranging in importance from attempted assassinations to Trinidad publicly condemning the Dominican Republic.

I started this game up during my lunch break, came back that evening and finished it in one five hour sitting. So.. yeah. Older reviews noted some technical issues. The only one that I ran up against happened when I first launched the game; no option to change the resolution. A limitation of the game engine, AGS. I was able to navigate the Steam thread and follow the advice in this post to get the game running at a sufficient size and quality.

This game is beautiful, and packed with references to cyberpunk fiction such as Blade Runner. Unfortunately my experience was shattered by a bug that caused the game to stutter in fits after every death. Not a problem if you’re Good At Video Games™️ but I’m not, and because the game includes a “second wind” mechanic that allows you to recover after some falls, on many levels I had to endure this at least twice.