Cringe.

This game is clearly inspired by the Ace Attorney series as it structured in almost the exact same way. With that said though, I don't think this quite nails it as well in the story department, nor the gameplay.

First, the story centers around Socrates dying, with his only way of returning to life being a bet to discover the origin of morals through debate. Throughout the game, you will debate many famous philosophers, trying to figure out the who might have the right idea about where morals come from. Now, while this is intriguing, the actual story quickly turns into something akin to "morals don't actually exist and is a social construct..." line of thought. Even the first actual debate of the game is an atheist's straw-manned argument against all religions, which just made me lose all respect for the game. Even if the Dev might be an atheist or not, you shouldn't make the first argument of the game centered on around disproving all religions in a very hand-waving way.

Second, the gameplay can be hit-and-miss. Compared to it's inspiration source (Ace Attorney), it is not nearly as clear when you are supposed to perform rebuttals, present evidence, or ask questions; making much of the arguments very hard to work through without resorting to guessing. When you need to start resorting yourself to guessing through the arguments, you are almost effectively brute-forcing your way through the gameplay just to get back to the story (which is supposed to serve the gameplay).

At the end of the day, if the gameplay and the story aren't very good, then there is no purpose to waste your time on this; even if it's free.

What a crap! There is just stupid dialogue. It's not a game at all.

Well, i will purge fire with fire, or in our case — philosophy. We got great music, pleasant visuals, funny jokes, clean UI and no bugs, but is it really worth positive review, if non-gameplay elements of a game are good? And how exactly to figure if game is good or bad, is there some sort of morale compass?

To me, gaming morale is always about comparison to other projects in same genre. This is Visual Novell, which pretty much loses to any nowdays novell from indie devs. And yes, even to free ones like Doki-Doki-Literature or Limbus Company. Player is able to choose 3 dialogue options for every enemy statement (4-5 per battle), majority of responses are 'you idiot / imbicil' or self-explanatory fillers. After fiding right one you receive 'challange word' then just put it in every statement until it sticks = there is no way to lose. So it is another Novell on a rails.

There is no depth and our opponents pretty much start mumbling and shutting up the moment we claim first 'right' line of text. In reality, those people built career off of their beliefs, they worked 30+ years on a subject and you will never 'win' battle of worlds against them, no matter how much evidence you provided. It is same as telling teacher "evolution is only a theory, it was never proven and was many times proved to be impossible", yet they will force you to learn evolution nonsense in school regardless. So back to the subject — game needs something more, a fiercer battles, a more stubborn opponents, not just "ok, my life for nothing, in 2 minutes you verbally proved i was wrong all time".

Now, the main subject here is morale — what exaclty causes us to aknowledge 'good' and 'bad' things, how to exactly determine it? And there is fundamental problem about it — morale does not exists (just like space, nudge nudge xD). It's not something you can observe, touch, explore or research. Example,- why would you start a long converstaion about Hobbits with some scientists and philosophers? They were created as part of book, never existed before. There is no sense.

Okay, lets take a look at other philosophy projects then and disregard whole 'novell' part. 'Stanley Parable" is good one with many endings and interesting hidden 'messages'. It has an actual gameplay elements with exploration and choises that do matter and have consequences. In fact, doing everything wrong and even not doing anything at all has consequences here. No rails. The other game would be "Oh...Sir!!" where whole gameplay built upon constructing dialogues and actually battling opponent, earning points and trying to be smart about it. Project has great modern humour, good varietty of actual characters, unique opponent passives and weaknesses, while also giving us progression system... AND cooperation with actual players!!! And mods workshop. Socrate Jones provides just nothing in comparison, seriously, why are we even talking about it?

So, in the end Socrate Jones is just very basic rail novell without actual gameplay, bad or non-existent choises, lack of modern elements. It does not provides replayability like "FreudBot" nor allows for multiple endings. Cannot recommend cus it just bad game according to my morale compass.