Game 198 - Indigo Prophecy (or Fahrenheit) by Quantic Dream
(please pardon the awful screenshots - I played this on a PS2 and do not have a capture card)
What did I think it was at first? I've heard great things about Quantic Dream games, so when we started our PS2 game collection this was definitely one I wanted to add! I ended up having trouble with my machine on this one - the memory card kept disconnecting so I ended up unable to finish the game. I played through about half of it and watched the rest on this LP by AndyDoesVoiceover. Andy is playing the remaster, but I played the original on PS2.
How was the character creator? You play as 3 different characters - Lucas, the man escaping his crimes, and the detectives pursuing him. The detectives are Carla and Tyler. In general, I was happy with the way Carla was depicted in the game as a capable woman who works hard at her career. She actually gets a fair amount of character development, however, Tyler was actually really stereotyped and I wasn't a fan? Each of his segments was accompanied by R&B style music and cringy slang. The game is from 2005 but I still think even then we knew as a society that this was not a good look.
There are attempts to add diverse characters to the game, but they come out as stereotypes as well. Carla's gay best friend and the bookshop owner come to mind.
How was the game? I think this is what happens when an alien makes a video game. It has a lot of elements on its own that are very fun - quick time events, branching narratives, and a story that evolves and develops into something absolutely batshit. It's a shame that nobody bothered to check if it was fun?
This does have one of the strongest starts to a game I've played. You're dropped straight in to the action as one of your playable characters commits a random murder and the other two have to try to process the scene. At times, it's challenging to decide which characters you want to succeed and it's even tempting to sabotage your other characters.
The gameplay is entirely based on exploration and quicktime events. There were some segments where a timer really put in work to build some tension, which was cool.
I think there was great attention to detail in the development of the narrative. Even though your choices don't necessarily change the story in a branching pattern, the sanity of the individual characters changed some dialogue options, as did pass/fail status on the checks. I'm not sure how many endings this game had? It was pretty cool to watch the LP and see how minute differences existed between my playthrough and Andy's.
As far as the actual plot goes, it's completely batshit. Hilarious, but batshit. There's a nonsensical shoehorned romance and a bunch of Nonsensically Capitalized Words.
What did I not love? Ultimately, what it comes down to is that the controls aren't fun. There's a lot of attention paid to the cinematics, however, overlaying the quicktime events causes you to fail them if you spend time watching the game. I missed segments of content and had to rewatch them because I was so focused on the quicktime events.
The control sticks for interactions became tedious after a while, and the amount of minutiae that I was expected to deal with made the game honestly pretty boring. One swipe to open the cabinet, one to take out a key, one to close the door, one to insert a key...it got old.
At 5 hours and $30.99, was it really worth it? God no. This game was atrocious. The story itself is engaging, but the actual act of playing the game was laborious. It was not fun.
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At the beginning of Fahrenheit, I thought it would be a detective story. But the second part with the Mayan tribes, superpowers, artificial intelligence and the oracle convinced me otherwise
It's actually a good game, but it feels like it was created based on two different plots
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