Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy thoughts (spoilery)
I got this game for Christmas this year, and I have to say I can't understand why most of the reviews I've seen of it are so good; pretty much every writeup I've seen has given the game a glowing recommendation, whereas I'd only describe it as "above average" rather than "classic". I can only assume that the reviews are based entirely on the demo, which covers the first scene of the game (or "movie", as Quantic Dream would like us to refer to it). I'll admit that it's a fantastic opening scene, with the player having to choose how to escape from a murder scene in the most detailed and interactive toilet ever to appear in a computer game whilst, thanks to the wonders of the split screen, you can see a policeman get up from the bar and slowly stroll towards the murder scene. The problem is that the game proceeds to undermine every positive feature of this sequence.
This rant is going to be spoilery, so I will use the magic of font tabs to disguise it. Select the text if you want to see it.
- I didn't get what I felt I was promised. The box blurb, the opening sequence of the game, and in fact the first half or so of the game established the thing as a deeply personal supernatural thriller, an exploration of guilt with supernatural elements which may or may not be figments of the main characters' mind (although from the start we're led to expect that they're more than just delusions), operating mainly on a low-key personal level. By the time I reached the end of the game I had been subjected to a fantasy extravangza complete with apocalyptic prophecies, martial arts sequences ripped from the Matrix, overblown plot elements sucked from Deus Ex (the two main factions competing for control of the Earth are, get this, an Illuminati-esque secret society and a collective of AIs), and an end sequence plagarised directly from Highlander. ("Hey, I have godlike power and I got the girl as well! Life is good.") I felt cheated.
- As well as the plot, the characterisation disintegrates mid-game. All the good work the designers had put into it is scrapped, and the people you've been cajoled into caring about start behaving like cardboard cutout action heroes. (The most egregious part is where the protagonist doesn't show much in the way of regret or remorse when his longterm squeeze dies, and when the female detective falls in love with him mere days after regarding him as a psychopathic serial killer.)
- The much-hyped multiple viewpoints thingummy is a dud. Initially the idea of playing both the murderer and the detectives investigating him is interesting, and the designers do have several interesting tricks they use to help this work, like not showing how you decide to hide the knife (if you choose to do so) as Lucas (the killer) so you won't know where it is when you're playing Carla and Tyler (the detectives). The problem is that the Lucas segments are the only truly pro-active parts of the game: as the detectives, you are being entirely reactive, struggling to solve a riddle which you-the-player already know the answer to. The Lucas segments are the only part where you have a real choice: as the detectives, you have to interact with everything you can interact with before moving on to the next scene.
- The control system used for most of the game was fairly decent, and is a nice way of implementing a 3D graphical adventure. Unfortunately, they scrap it for the action sequences. During these, you either have to hammer the left and right arrow keys repeatedly (yes, just like in Ye Olde Sportes Games of times past), or push two sets of direction keys when you are told to by glowy lights in a manner vaguely reminiscent of Dance Dance Revolution. The upshot is that you don't actually get to concentrate on the exciting action bits, because you're distracted by all the meters and lights you have to pay attention to; I'd have much rather watched them as cut scenes, to be honest, since they're really not very interactive in the first place. (You also have to do the DDR thing at random points during conversations - it was only after a while that I realised that this was to determine whether or not Lucas's telepathy would help him at that juncture. I'd have rather foregone the telepathy and been allowed to pay attention to the conversation, personally.)
- There's the occasional scene which is inserted for no apparent purpose whatsoever, unless it was the designer's intention to ruin the pacing of the game and wreck the atmosphere. There's a segment where you're playing Carla, sitting in her office, staring at a big pile of evidence saying "LUCAS IS THE KILLER", and you're expected to prove that Lucas is the killer by matching pieces of information together. The result is a trivially easy puzzle that takes all of the drama of the detectives realising that they have their man. There is a superfluous boxing sequence and a pointless basketball game, both of which use the execrable DDR system. Just when things are getting tense and claustrophobic and terrifying, they throw in a banal minigame. What's most frustrating about this is that when they aren't subjecting you to minigames, Quantic Dream frequently prove that they can establish a suitably dark and brooding atmosphere for the game; if they'd only concentrated on this tone instead of consistently breaking it, the game would have been much more engaging.
- The depiction of Tyler, the black policeman, is totally racist. He is an ex-gang member. He swaggers around the screen to a funk soundtrack. His apartment looks like a set from a blaxploitation flick. He says "yo" a lot. He plays basketball. There's a sequence where an old man of Chinese origin mentions that he was actually born and raised in Brooklyn, and he's therefore "more American than you [Tyler] are", implying that an Asian man who's lived in America all his life is more American than a black man who's lived in America all his life. Making someone who's *supposed* to be one of the main characters of the game an enormous racial sterotype is just dumb.
- Speaking of "supposed to be one of the main characters", Tyler is entirely superfluous, to the point where he gets written out of the game before the final confrontation no matter what you do. He doesn't appear in any of the endings, he doesn't make any contribution to the plot that Carla couldn't have done instead, he seems to exist solely to provide someone for Carla to talk to, although given that the game designers aren't averse to subjecting us to five-minute chunks of characters' internal monologues one wonders why even that was necessary. There is no reason for him to be there.
- Towards the end of the game, it becomes brutally clear that all the apparent choices you had early on were actually meaningless. It didn't matter whether you did a good job of cleaning up the murder scene or whether you just ran in the beginning; oh, it may have changed some minor aspects of the first few scenes with the detectives, but they would have caught you no sooner and no later. In general, any decision you make at any point in the game will only affect the next two or three scenes, and only in minor ways. In the last third of the game the interactive elements disappear almost entirely, and you're left with a parade of dull action sequences leading to the only real choice in the game. And even then, it's not really a choice: of the three endings of the game, two only happen if you end up failing at the final hurdle; compare to Deus Ex, a similarly linear game which nonetheless gave the impression of genuine freedom with its three distinct endings because you're making an informed choice, not explicitly "winning" or losing".
- The game is short. It took me 6 hours to play through it, and I spent a good deal of time on some of the segments.
- The console-inspired features are obtrusive and mood-shattering. There's a bunch of bonus features, like little movies and wallpapers and soundtrack clips, which you can unlock by playing the game and earning bonus points. You earn these points by uncovering and picking up big shiny spinny playing cards which look totally out of place in the game. This sort of bullshit has no place in a supernatural psycho-thriller.
- David Cage is a pretentious creep. He talks about the game as being a "movie" with a straight face, and he animates himself dancing with an underpants-wearing Carla in one of the unlockable segements of the game.
The bottom line: Fahrenheit/Indigo Dream itself isn't going to spark the promised rebirth of the adventure game genre all the reviewers are raving about, although the demo version might: the best aspects of the game and the best *potential* the game had are all there, but in the full product they are squandered. Hopefully future game designers are going to take their cues from the game I hoped Fahrenheit would be, rather than the one it turned out to be.
This rant is going to be spoilery, so I will use the magic of font tabs to disguise it. Select the text if you want to see it.
- I didn't get what I felt I was promised. The box blurb, the opening sequence of the game, and in fact the first half or so of the game established the thing as a deeply personal supernatural thriller, an exploration of guilt with supernatural elements which may or may not be figments of the main characters' mind (although from the start we're led to expect that they're more than just delusions), operating mainly on a low-key personal level. By the time I reached the end of the game I had been subjected to a fantasy extravangza complete with apocalyptic prophecies, martial arts sequences ripped from the Matrix, overblown plot elements sucked from Deus Ex (the two main factions competing for control of the Earth are, get this, an Illuminati-esque secret society and a collective of AIs), and an end sequence plagarised directly from Highlander. ("Hey, I have godlike power and I got the girl as well! Life is good.") I felt cheated.
- As well as the plot, the characterisation disintegrates mid-game. All the good work the designers had put into it is scrapped, and the people you've been cajoled into caring about start behaving like cardboard cutout action heroes. (The most egregious part is where the protagonist doesn't show much in the way of regret or remorse when his longterm squeeze dies, and when the female detective falls in love with him mere days after regarding him as a psychopathic serial killer.)
- The much-hyped multiple viewpoints thingummy is a dud. Initially the idea of playing both the murderer and the detectives investigating him is interesting, and the designers do have several interesting tricks they use to help this work, like not showing how you decide to hide the knife (if you choose to do so) as Lucas (the killer) so you won't know where it is when you're playing Carla and Tyler (the detectives). The problem is that the Lucas segments are the only truly pro-active parts of the game: as the detectives, you are being entirely reactive, struggling to solve a riddle which you-the-player already know the answer to. The Lucas segments are the only part where you have a real choice: as the detectives, you have to interact with everything you can interact with before moving on to the next scene.
- The control system used for most of the game was fairly decent, and is a nice way of implementing a 3D graphical adventure. Unfortunately, they scrap it for the action sequences. During these, you either have to hammer the left and right arrow keys repeatedly (yes, just like in Ye Olde Sportes Games of times past), or push two sets of direction keys when you are told to by glowy lights in a manner vaguely reminiscent of Dance Dance Revolution. The upshot is that you don't actually get to concentrate on the exciting action bits, because you're distracted by all the meters and lights you have to pay attention to; I'd have much rather watched them as cut scenes, to be honest, since they're really not very interactive in the first place. (You also have to do the DDR thing at random points during conversations - it was only after a while that I realised that this was to determine whether or not Lucas's telepathy would help him at that juncture. I'd have rather foregone the telepathy and been allowed to pay attention to the conversation, personally.)
- There's the occasional scene which is inserted for no apparent purpose whatsoever, unless it was the designer's intention to ruin the pacing of the game and wreck the atmosphere. There's a segment where you're playing Carla, sitting in her office, staring at a big pile of evidence saying "LUCAS IS THE KILLER", and you're expected to prove that Lucas is the killer by matching pieces of information together. The result is a trivially easy puzzle that takes all of the drama of the detectives realising that they have their man. There is a superfluous boxing sequence and a pointless basketball game, both of which use the execrable DDR system. Just when things are getting tense and claustrophobic and terrifying, they throw in a banal minigame. What's most frustrating about this is that when they aren't subjecting you to minigames, Quantic Dream frequently prove that they can establish a suitably dark and brooding atmosphere for the game; if they'd only concentrated on this tone instead of consistently breaking it, the game would have been much more engaging.
- The depiction of Tyler, the black policeman, is totally racist. He is an ex-gang member. He swaggers around the screen to a funk soundtrack. His apartment looks like a set from a blaxploitation flick. He says "yo" a lot. He plays basketball. There's a sequence where an old man of Chinese origin mentions that he was actually born and raised in Brooklyn, and he's therefore "more American than you [Tyler] are", implying that an Asian man who's lived in America all his life is more American than a black man who's lived in America all his life. Making someone who's *supposed* to be one of the main characters of the game an enormous racial sterotype is just dumb.
- Speaking of "supposed to be one of the main characters", Tyler is entirely superfluous, to the point where he gets written out of the game before the final confrontation no matter what you do. He doesn't appear in any of the endings, he doesn't make any contribution to the plot that Carla couldn't have done instead, he seems to exist solely to provide someone for Carla to talk to, although given that the game designers aren't averse to subjecting us to five-minute chunks of characters' internal monologues one wonders why even that was necessary. There is no reason for him to be there.
- Towards the end of the game, it becomes brutally clear that all the apparent choices you had early on were actually meaningless. It didn't matter whether you did a good job of cleaning up the murder scene or whether you just ran in the beginning; oh, it may have changed some minor aspects of the first few scenes with the detectives, but they would have caught you no sooner and no later. In general, any decision you make at any point in the game will only affect the next two or three scenes, and only in minor ways. In the last third of the game the interactive elements disappear almost entirely, and you're left with a parade of dull action sequences leading to the only real choice in the game. And even then, it's not really a choice: of the three endings of the game, two only happen if you end up failing at the final hurdle; compare to Deus Ex, a similarly linear game which nonetheless gave the impression of genuine freedom with its three distinct endings because you're making an informed choice, not explicitly "winning" or losing".
- The game is short. It took me 6 hours to play through it, and I spent a good deal of time on some of the segments.
- The console-inspired features are obtrusive and mood-shattering. There's a bunch of bonus features, like little movies and wallpapers and soundtrack clips, which you can unlock by playing the game and earning bonus points. You earn these points by uncovering and picking up big shiny spinny playing cards which look totally out of place in the game. This sort of bullshit has no place in a supernatural psycho-thriller.
- David Cage is a pretentious creep. He talks about the game as being a "movie" with a straight face, and he animates himself dancing with an underpants-wearing Carla in one of the unlockable segements of the game.
The bottom line: Fahrenheit/Indigo Dream itself isn't going to spark the promised rebirth of the adventure game genre all the reviewers are raving about, although the demo version might: the best aspects of the game and the best *potential* the game had are all there, but in the full product they are squandered. Hopefully future game designers are going to take their cues from the game I hoped Fahrenheit would be, rather than the one it turned out to be.
posted by Arthur at 7:39 PM
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