Green braces. Tan shirt. Blond quiff. That's the mantra I repeat in my head as I skulk through a smoggy industrial hellscape. Hidden among these brown corridors is someone who looks like this. Someone who looks like me. Someone who wants me dead.
The only way to avoid that is to kill them first, a plan I'm well on the way to executing. I've already found a weapon, a gun that shoots timed exploding mines. This is better than a knife, which means getting up close, but worse than a pistol, which has lower risk of collateral damage. Finding my target is proving tricky, however. The building site I'm trapped in is thronged with people, while braces and quiffs seem to be in vogue.
Eventually I spy green braces and a blond quiff on a man standing with his back to me, in a narrow room housing a large boiler. But as I'm about to plant a mine on his back, all hell breaks loose. A patrolling policeman picks someone out of the crowd and starts brutally beating them to death. The crowd roils as dozens of people race screaming for the doors, and amid the confusion my target slinks away.
I catch up with them a few minutes later, again stood with their back to me, the crowd thinner this time. I raise the mine launcher again. But another policeman spots me doing this, and demands to know what I'm doing. I glance to see where the cop is, and in that split second my fate is sealed. The screen flashes red, and the camera pans down to show a gaping crimson hole in my stomach. My character glances up to show a man with my face holding a bloody knife, lingering on their burning red eyes for a second before the screen fades to black.
Welcome to DoubleWe, a single-player social stealth game in which you're tasked with killing your own clone. Developed by Turkish indie studio NightByte games, DoubleWe launched a demo earlier this year to virtually zero fanfare. I urge you to give it a try, as it's one of my favourite demos I've played in ages.
Each of DoubleWe's scenarios starts by placing you in a randomly generated chunk of vaguely cyberpunk city. I say "vaguely", because you shouldn't go in expecting the preposterous scale and detail of CD Projekt's Night City. DoubleWe's environments are mostly brown corridors and sparsely decorated construction sites, with most of its cyberpunk vibe stemming from the columns of futuristic airships flying overhead.
Ultimately though, DoubleWe's setting doesn't matter. What matters is the events that transpire within these spaces. When you spawn, your character is equipped with a single piece of equipment. Sometimes it's a mirror. Sometimes it's a shard of glass. Either way, you use it to look at your reflection and identify your distinguishing features. Your gender, your hairstyle, your eye-colour, what kind of top you're wearing, whether you're wearing shorts or pants. Each new level casts you as a different person, and memorising what you look like is the first step in survival.
From this point onward, you need to be on your guard. Somewhere out there is an exact clone of you, and if they see you, they will try to kill you. DoubleWe's demo doesn't explain the nature of these clones, but the menu screen makes it clear they are several steps left of human. In any case, you want to be the one who spies them first (and ideally, the one who shoots first too).
To do this, there are two key obstacles you'll need to overcome. Firstly, you spawn without a weapon, meaning you need to find one of the highly convenient briefcases scattered around and retrieve the randomised weapon within. Secondly, the level is crammed with dozens of other people, all milling around and getting between you and your target. Not only do collateral kills lower your score, since all weapons are single-use items, killing the wrong person also leaves you defenceless. What results is a mixture of Guess Who, Hide-and-Seek, and Hitman, as you search the passing crowds for your target and wait for an opportune moment to assassinate them.
It's an ingenious concept, although DoubleWe can take a few rounds to demonstrate its potential. Initially, finding and killing your clone isn't that difficult. Because of DoubleWe's simplistic visual style and its cardboard cutout NPCs, identifying your target is usually straightforward. You'll occasionally spot someone who looks similar enough to your target to warrant a quick check in the mirror, but you must be extremely cavalier to kill wrong person. Moreover, because your clone only ever attacks with a knife, confrontations are usually resolved quickly.
I will say, however, that pulling the trigger is explosively violent, far gnarlier and more physical than you might expect given DoubleWe's simple presentation. Moreover, even at this stage, interesting scenarios can emerge. Sometimes you'll spot the clone before you've found a weapon, and have to quietly sneak past them as you search for a briefcase. Sometimes they'll spot you before you've found a weapon, at which point you'll need to quickly exit the area to stop your doppelganger chasing you down. Showdowns can also play out in slightly different ways. I've encountered clones that hesitate when you point your weapon at them, and others that race toward you with alarming speed whether you're armed or not.
Crucially though, DoubleWe's demo lets you play more than one level, through which scenarios grow progressively more difficult. Environments become larger and crowds thicker, while the game folds in new ideas like the aforementioned policemen, as well as NPCs who become weirdly fascinated by you, following you around and obscuring your vision. Levels can also be affected by randomised mutators, making environments darker or foggy.
In these latter stages, DoubleWe can be an superbly effective paranoia generator. In one level, I spotted my target and then lost them as they ducked into a corridor. As I followed them, a surge of bodies came tumbling the other way, and as I tried to navigate through the swarm, my clone stepped out of the column and shanked me dead. There's also nothing quite like rounding a corner to be immediately confronted by your clone to jolt you awake.
The more I played DoubleWe, the more it got under my skin. It's fascinating how quickly a situation can feel like it's slipping from your control, as you go from diligently stalking your prey to being jostled relentlessly in a crowd, your anxiety mounting with each dot-eyed face that passes by. And just when you think you've got the measure of it, something will happen that catches you off guard.
As I mentioned, DoubleWe is currently only available as a demo. But the demo feels like a surprisingly complete experience, with a multi-level arc, new weapons that unlock as you play, and even a resolution of sorts. Indeed, one concern I have is how well the experience will translate to a full-length game, as the demo's snackable form feels ideal for the concept. Sniffing out clones is an excellent way to kill half an hour, and the nature of the games makes the demo fairly replayable. But I'm not sure how well it will extend over ten or twenty times that length.
I hope I'm wrong, though, because it's a fantastic idea, and there are certainly things a full game could improve, like adding more interesting spaces for events to play out, folding weapons more naturally into the environment, and making clones harder to discern from the larger crowd. There's no word on when the version of DoubleWe will be released, but when the demo is this fun, I'm happy to wait.
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