This game is polished and interesting, but lacks what I would consider an actual gameplay mechanic. It's essentially just a chatroom with puppet avatars, little different from a Discord chat. "Evidence" has no meaning as it neither limits nor expands gameplay options, so it's very ignorable in-game.

If they overhauled this to be more of a "mad-libs"-style game where you're provided an overarching skeleton in which you slot evidence and try to get more of your evidence in the case than the other side does, I think this game would become well-worth revisiting.

GUILTY AS SOCK isn't really "bad". I do wish I could give it a mixed review, instead. Rather, I find myself broadly agreeing with the critiques of other reviewers: it lacks structure and relies heavily on those you play with both knowing what they're doing as far as general court stuff goes, as well as being funny. The game generally fumbles its opportunities to provide its players with the resources to be funnier than they naturally are, as well as make the game a more engaging, goal-driven experience beyond being a chat room that you all play pretend in.

Don't get me wrong, I've definitely had some great laughs with this. The game provides, at a base level, a broad role for you to interpret and get into the action with. But I've also, equally, felt it be clunky - the general scope of each case is confusing and there's a lack of connection between the charge and the trial itself. That's down to giving the players freedom to choose what they want, but it's just too free-form for its own good and, at a minimum, I'd hope for optional gamemodes that have more formality to them.

I'm not expecting a legal simulator here, but a little bit more handholding would be good for the uninitiated, especially seeing as everyone participating has to buy into the experience too (in both senses). It's a bit infuriating to feel lost or that you haven't really "won" or done your job well based on a lack of structure. Then GUILTY AS SOCK loses its veneer of being something unique to this game mode and it feels a lot more like a Discord call with proximity chat.

There IS support for custom card decks to provide talking points for the prosecution and defence, but you have to go into the community Discord to find them. There's no quality control there and I'm not particularly happy with having to sift through someone else's bad idea of what's funny to get to some gold within. Can we have any kind of community integration here?

On the whole, a lot of promise but GUILTY AS SOCK is yet to cross the boundary of really being a great party game. The devs do put in updates, but I think there needs to be a more fundamental set of changes to the game to find the broader appeal they want it to have.

This isn't a game, it's a colorful box of toys. If that's your thing then okay, unfortunately it is not mine.