I played a game to completion between Sunday and Tuesday this week. It was Fahrenheit, and I played the PAL Xbox version (though it has come out for PS2 and PC as well).
It is a few years old now but the game is set in January 2009 so now is a good time to play it!
The game is by a French company called Quantic Dream, and it plays as an "interactive film" and starts off really well. In fact, that's underselling it. It starts out really really amazingly well. For all the dozens of games I've played that call themselves interactive films, this one got the balance most right. Sometimes I'm left thinking "I don't really feel like I'm playing", or "this is just an ordinary game", but this one started with the balance exactly right.
It starts off as a detective story with you acting in one scene as the murderer, panicking and clearing up the bloody mess, then in the next scene as the police, finding all the clues. You spend time evading yourself, then hunting yourself down, and it's really entertaining and well done. I got to thinking "if only the Shenmue games had been crafted this well". There was always an atmosphere of pursuit, never letting up, and that's good - a lot of games let you wander off, do sidequests, collect gatchapon figures or whatever, and that might be fun but it makes the story lose its momentum. And it feels unreal, back to cliché game mechanics. In this, the pressure was on and you cannot escape. Well, it does in some scenes, but then you find yourself thinking how easy the police have it while the guy they are chasing is having a terrible time, so that's good.
The action sequences are all done with what I call "Quick Time Events" ever since Shenmue, even though the mechanic existed long before and was the staple of things like Dragon's Lair and Space Ace, as well as dozens of Mega CD games. An action sequence starts and you have to push the joypad analogue sticks in the directions shown on screen. In a lot of games, this mechanism is often flawed - in Dragon's Lair it required too much trial and error. In a lot of games that show arrows, you are paying so much attention to the arrows on screen that you never get to really watch the scene to find out what happened. In this game, you see two translucent four-sided shapes in the centre of the screen and the side you need to move sticks to lights up. This is fairly unobtrusive, so you get to watch the scene. There is another mechanism too - sometimes you are asked to press the trigger buttons alternately to build up an on-screen bar. Another issue with the "QTE" game mechanic is often that these sequences are often one-chance scenes - that is, if you mess up one arrow you fail the scene and get game over and have to repeat the scene. In many cases at the start, Fahrenheit was forgiving; sometimes you would not get as good an outcome to a scene if you had not completely succeeded, but it would be catered for in the story and it felt natural. Stopping and beginning a scene from last save point is often jarring.
The acting seemed good, and the character movements are also very natural and human; they used an awful lot of motion capture on this game, and the result is that even if the characters have jaggedy edges to their bodies, they move like real people. The facial expressions are realistic too, really good.
Unfortunately, though, the game did not continue as brilliantly as it had done all the way through to the end. It was excellent as a detective game with occult / supernatural overtones to it, but after that part of the story was complete, it became a completely over-the-top superhero film. I do enjoy superhero films a lot, but it did not suit this game as the atmosphere and emotional impact of the story was lost, the multitude of elements they added seemed too cliché, and all of the action scenes are played out with QTEs which seemed to drag on too long by the end. The thing where you get a sudden "Game Over" and restart from last save started appearing, and did so fairly often! Mostly it's the sudden change in tone that made the end seem poor.
Still, I'm glad I played this game! It took me just under 6 hours total (according to the in-game timer). The company who made this also made a game called "The Nomad Soul" which I bought the PC version of many years ago but never got round to playing. I think I will look for it and see if I can get it running! They are also working on a new game called "Heavy Rain" which is going to be for PS3 and is much anticipated, so I hope that turns out well; I will follow reviews when it comes out.
BTW - one last point. I read on wikipedia that Fahrenheit came out in North America under the name of "The Indigo Prophecy" and was edited so that the sex scenes were removed. That seems a bit strange; that they would leave in the brutal violent and bloody ritual murder right at the start of the game, but cut out the short scene with two consenting adults having sex. Granted the first one was a bit embarrassing, having to move the joystick to make the guy thrust, but strange that it should be censored. It's not that explicit, and the game got an overall age rating of 15 here, completely uncensored. Odd.
(Actually, it was the implied sex at the end of the game that I found distasteful... but that would have been left in as nothing was seen...)
