One Mission, Two Realities, Multiple Solutions – This Is ‘Dex’

Currently in development, Dex is an upcoming cyberpunk RPG where players flip-flop between the real-world and the augmented reality of cyberspace in order to defeat enemies and obstacles that lay in their path.

Inspired by Castlevania, Deus Ex, and Splinter Cell, it will surprise no one to learn that Dex is a 2D platformer featuring stealth mechanics and a combat system that is split between both realities.

“You can walk, talk, sneak, and fight in Basic Reality – and you can also decide to jack into the matrix. Doing so, your consciousness leaves your body and enters augmented reality in the form of an avatar,” Dex’s developer, Dreadlocks, explains in an update on Kickstarter.

Dreadlocks goes on to explain the uses that one can have for switching between the basic (normal) reality and the augmented reality, “Your actions in augmented reality have results in basic reality: You hack a door and it opens, you hack a guard’s implants and he is paralyzed. Your actions in BR have results in AR: You place an explosive and destroy a hardware firewall component in BR and when you switch to AR, the data is no longer protected by the firewall.”

Dex also features the ability for the player to utilize implants, which will further alter what the protagonist is able to do in basic reality. For example, Retinal AR Implants allow the player to locate enemies through obstructions, for better planning. Alongside the Retinal AR Implants, Dreadlocks has revealed plans for artificial limbs, electrostatic conductors, a nanite blood infusion, and more, in a recent Kickstarter update.

Earlier in November, Dreadlocks put Dex on Kickstarter, in effort to collect enough to fund the team hiring a full-on English voice cast, a professional script editor, and a number of various additions to both the team and the music that will accompany this adventure within Harbor Prime.

Within ten days, Dex had met its $22,710 (£14,000) goal. Clearly, gamers can’t wait to jump into the realities of Dex, and I can’t blame them.

Dex is expected to be released in February, 2014, on PC, Mac, Linux, and OUYA.

Check out Dex on Kickstarter, and follow the developers on Twitter.