Rent-a-Vice

A debt-ridden private investigator navigates a near-future city where people pay to feel somebody else’s dangerous pleasures without risking their own skin. Rent-a-Vice frames its cyberpunk noir mystery around a brutally uncomfortable idea: “feeders” lease out their bodies so wealthy clients can experience everything from reckless indulgence to lethal thrills at a distance. The case begins with a missing lover, but the investigation quickly becomes entangled with political hypocrisy, corporate exploitation, addiction, and the protagonist’s fight to keep custody of their child. Its mood is grim, intimate, and morally charged rather than action-heavy, with every apparent solution carrying a human cost.

Play unfolds as a substantial choice-driven interactive novel, with your decisions shaping the investigator’s methods, relationships, ethics, and eventual role in the Vice economy. Leads come through conversations, favors, deductions, and direct encounters with the unsettling virtual-experience technology, requiring you to decide whom to trust, pressure, protect, or betray. Character creation supports male, female, and non-binary protagonists, along with gay, straight, and bisexual identities, while personal struggles such as debt, substance use, parenting, and a complicated ex remain central to the plot. Branches allow for compassionate detective work, cynical self-enrichment, resistance against the system, or a more destructive route that turns the investigation into a campaign against the entire industry.

What stands out is how seriously the writing treats its speculative premise instead of using cyberpunk imagery as background decoration. The virtual experiences create room for disturbing perspective shifts, while the story repeatedly asks whether consent and payment can ever make exploitation acceptable. With no visuals or voice work, the experience depends entirely on prose and player imagination, closer to Choice of Games-style narrative RPGs than to a conventional detective adventure. Fans of Disco Elysium’s political unease, Black Mirror’s technology nightmares, and branching fiction with meaningful moral consequences find plenty to engage with, especially if they prefer difficult choices over clean heroic victories.