I've been meaning to write something up about it for a while but have been putting it off... I never got a "good" ending to the story, though I kind of worked out how to get one (find out the secret of the old woman, save her, use her in the end game...)
It's an interactive movie. As in, actual film footage. The picture quality is not great but it's a lot better than most; it's about what you expect from PS1 era technology. The main character is a psychic, he gets roped into being a detective. His power is that he can get into the mind of people he can see. This means that you can switch the game flow to the viewpoint of other characters, and view their interactions, if they leave the room you can switch to other characters, etc etc etc. You also have a small amount of influence, so you can try and save people or find out things, or whatever.
In terms of technical achievement... well, it must have taken ages to film and re-film scenes from different viewpoints, and the transition is quite believeable. You would not think that the same scene had been re-filmed from another angle when playing.
In terms of story and gameplay... the first time I played through the story I got to the end and was "wha???". It made no sense. Well, it made a bit of sense but not really. It doesn't take too long to play through the game again, so I played it through a few times, took different routes, found out some more and then I knew what is going on in the story.
I still have some gripes:
* The story, when unravelled, is still not that amazing.
* It's really annoying to have to change disks on Playstation every 10 minutes.
* It's boring to watch the same scene lots of times just to choose a different path in the story.
So, I know what to do to get a good ending but I have run out of motivation to go and watch it again to get better endings.
A lot of story-based games these days (e.g. visual novels) have a "skip" option so you can quickly run through bits you've read before, and choose an alternate path in the story. It would be difficult to put that in this game though, because paths are taken in a more organic fashion - the film never stops to let you choose, you have to hop to the next person or perform an action when the chance arrives.
So one of the game's strong points also leads to its weak point. I could use a lot of save files, I suppose...
