1. They were *punishingly* hard (see: rooftop fight), which seemed to only serve to pad out the incredibly linear narrative.

2. The actions had no relation to what your character was doing. Almost all “good” QTEs have some implied action, so you can at least feel some form of connection to the button-presses. Shenmue is good at this, when you need to hurdle over something you press a button, when you need to move around someone you press left. As far as I remember, the QTEs in IP were simply a game of Simon Says for the heck of it. You may as well have answered maths questions for the amount of on-screen connection.

I guess that they thought they were adding some sort of haste or action element to the proceedings, which was really not achieved. However, one of the most heart-racing moments in games occurs in IF when you’re asked whether to jump into the frozen lake or not. You have 3 seconds to decide… *That* was an adrenaline pumping piece of action. Seeing as most people would only have played through once, the changes in the story when confronted with such choices could have been entirely cosmetic and affected the narrative not one iota. A good 50% of the QTEs could have been replaced with something like that.

As I said in my comment in Noah’s post; Tyler’s morning routine was actually one of the most touching parts of the game for me. The basketball was not. If they were trying to “train” you, it doesn’t stop the QTEs being utterly unrelated to anything. Again, they could have trained me to answer math questions with long division. My GRE test score might go up, but I’m not getting any closer to solving the riddle of Kane’s murderous episode!

As for the Simon game, I think you’re right that it can be interesting to force the player to look somewhere else than at the things they most want to see. What if I really wanted to see who was stealing my car, and where they were taking it, but I had to keep my eye on the tightrope I’m walking? I could see something like that working in a story-focused game. Or, closer to IP, what if it was a challenge (requiring the two analogue sticks) to keep looking Agatha straight in the eyes, while things I want to look at more happen all around behind the image of her head? These things would be fine with me. But I regard it as a complete failure to take the most important narrative events of the game, in a story-focused game, and prevent me from seeing them so that I can stare at blinking colored lights that have no role in the narrative.

I enjoyed them. They were fun, and they did train me in the interface without making it feel like training. Second, I liked that they were games-within-games – essentially consequence-free for the larger story, but fun to explore the outcomes. They really give parts of an otherwise very dark work a light touch, particularly ice skating at the edge of apocalypse – all in all, a whole lot of whistling in the dark goes on in Indigo Prophecy, and that helps separate it from other genres.

The scenes also do specific characterization work – the cops having slightly different fighting styles and radically different skating abilities, for example. All that said, I agree that they feel disconnected – they felt like fragments of a much, much larger game, in which what one learns about the characters (e.g. that both are fierce, but one is more agile) might have some significance in choosing one to take on a later task, or if patterns learned in the boxing ring recur when a cop is trapped in an alley fight. But it just isn’t that kind of game.

I would definitely play another game by David Cage with even more QTE Simon, especially if that involved not only martial arts but conversation and quotidian moments. In the end, however, I think the problem with the QTE characterizing minigames is that they belong to the first half of the work, and the story world goes so hugely off the rails in the second half that it is hard to understand why the personality of an off-stage cop matters to the genre-conflagration, let alone that personality as shown in a basketball game. Before the final stages, I felt quite differently – but finishing the work pushes me to either see large portions of first half as pointless or else imagine a different work with a different ending. I love the potential in the first half of Indigo Prophecy, so I tend to do the second.