As for the sex scenes, I guess this is a case where I should be glad for my home country’s prudishness? They were cut from the release in the U.S.

BEGIN (yucky) SPOILER
There were two. One with Kane’s ex-girlfriend early on in the game, which was largely unremarkable. The later one, between Kane and Carla was awful. It took place in the subways _after_ Kane has “died”. Carla even remarks on his skin being cold. Ew.
END

Another thing that really bugged me in this game was the temperature thing. The early game made it seem much more important than it turned out to be. And the stupidest thing: The non-US version of the game was called “Fahrenheit”, but then they converted the on-screen thermometer to Celcius.

That being said, I played the PC version using an xbox-like controller, and the ‘balancing’ control challenges drove me crazy. I think I spent quite a while sending Carla into a catatonic state in the basement. But I eventually got the hang of it.

I really liked the character switching, because it became less about helping the protagonist ‘win’, and more about getting the story to unfold- all three characters were essentially pursuing the same goal of solving the mystery, but each bringing their own skills and knowledge to the table. Kind of an interesting change.

Am I the only one that decided not to mix pills with alcohol?

Chris, Malcolm, one curious thing to me is that you two reacted so differently to playing both Lucas and the police. Personally, I think it worked up until a certain point — when the game seemed to break one of its own cardinal rules. I’ll get into that in my next post.

Also, what you both say about the beginning being better than the end is something Cage has definitely talked about. For example, in his Game Developer postmortem he agrees that the end has plot problems (I don’t think that’s too spoilery a thing to say) and he also says:

I made the mistake of not devoting enough time to the last hour of the game. I was convinced (and rightly so) that the first hour of the game would be decisive for hooking the player…

Here we are, three players who were hooked by the first hour and utterly turned off by the last one.

Malcolm, you’re definitely right about Lucas’s premonitions. They created urgency, and gave additional information, in a way that made sense. Also, they made the 24-style split screen operate as more than a gimmick. As for the sex scenes, I guess this is a case where I should be glad for my home country’s prudishness? They were cut from the release in the U.S.

As for IP being a “story-telling” game, that’s true. But I think it’s important to point out — as you do — how much of the gameplay that works is actually determining the micro level of how the story plays out in a particular scene. It’s not like a game with combat sequences which, if successful, always lead to the same canned dialogue. Instead it’s a game with some pretty successful uses of a timed dialogue engine, in which the same scene can have different tones and reveal different information depending on how you play. I think that’s what makes Cage’s use of the term “interactive drama” something other than a joke, even if the macro-level story has very little variation.

As for the lights, I’ll post my thought on them soon. A key point for the lessons I want to draw here.

PS — Chris, I killed myself with the wiskey and pills as well. What is it about us that we didn’t know better? :)

The best feature by far, which Noah has already touched on, is the tension created by alternating between playing the murderer and the cops. I think this is really a novel creation and a very effective one. It should be lauded as a success for interactive story. It has created a dramatic effect which I think would not be nearly so so effective in another form. Playing the characters forces you to sympathise with them and take on their goals, in a way that just reading about or watching them can never do. The sense of conflict that I felt was very real, and it is played out well, up until a major confrontation scene between the two sides.

The other thing I thought worked well was the premonitions the murderer has at the beginning of certain scenes. They work well as both foreboding and also as directions of how to play out the scene without too much floundering (which is otherwise a much too common feature of adventure games). They made it possible to have tense time-limited scenes, without creating a “learning-by-dying” scenario. This didn’t always work for me (I still ‘died’ many times in the army base scene) but for the most part it was effective.

The worst feature by far was the ending. This was just a failure of imagination on the part of the writers. What started out as an intriguing mystery was resolved into a blandly generic fantasy ending. Oh and the sex scene was gross. Ick. Ick. Ick.

To pre-empt what Noah is going to say about the “game” elements – I found them to be an entertaining challenge, but one that distracted from the story. To play the scenes I had to concentrate on the lights, which meant that I could give little attention to the actual scene that I was supposedly controlling. Often I got successfully to the end of a challenge only to wonder exactly what my character had been doing while I has been pressing the keys.

It should also be said that (to use James Wallis’ terms) this is a “story-telling” game, not a “story-making” game. The author has a particular story to tell and the player’s input into it is minor. Essentially the player just has to complete each scene in order to drive the story forward. There is some freedom within the scene, but the only major departures from the main storyline are failure (losing the game).

In all, while this game doesn’t really depart very far from traditional story-game mechanics, it does show how these mechanics can be used to good effect to produce a story-telling experience which is uniquely interactive. The story is told through active player participation, which (at least in some scenes) gives it a potency that a passive telling would struggle to achieve. To find this in a commercially published work is, I think, a milestone for the interactive narrative movement.

You could play without the diversions, but things took time to happen, giving you plenty of time to fiddle. The sudden death syndrome this created was really, really not fun.

Oh hey, I’m depressed, I’ll take some pills. Mmm. Pills.

What’s in the cupboard? Whiskey. Awesome, I’ll calm down. Drink the whiskey.

Collapse. Dead.

“I knew I shouldn’t have mixed alcohol and pain killers” (or words to that effect).

If I’d known, I wouldn’t have done it!

Leaving the player to his/her own devices and then letting them commit non-obvious methods of suicide is plain frustrating.

I also found the dichotomy of playing the police and Kane frustrating. Like you said, you’ve bonded with Kane… and now you’re being asked to ruin him. Doing badly with the police was once mooted as a way of getting Kane off the hook, obviously that didn’t reach the final game because the story is completely on rails until the multiple-endings. And doing badly with the police results in you being chastised and your officer feeling depressed.

It all hints towards a greater game and a greater narrative in Cage’s vision that never reached fruition, either by running out of money, will or the publisher kicking it out the door. That the first half of the game was so much better than the last half seems to indicate this as well.