Adventure games are a bizarre thing if you think about it. They tell you a story but make you sing for your narrative supper by doing all the plot-moving donkeywork yourself. It sounds like more effort than it’s worth when you could enjoy a regular novel or movie without having to bash ‘look’ repeatedly to find those wretched valve handles.
Fahrenheit is different. Fahrenheit doesn’t just tell a story; it lets you poke its substance, feel its characters, mould its tone, and steer your own path through whichever of its frozen avenues you choose.
The story begins with a grisly murder in a restaurant toilet. The killer, Lucas Kane, was a perfectly normal man just moments before, when a trance-like vision drove him to kill a complete stranger. This is where your adventure begins with some tough decisions ‘ and you don’t have long to make them. Should you hide the body’ Maybe creep through an open window and run for it’ You’ll witness the consequences of your actions ‘ and those yet to come ‘ as you alternate between playing both Kane and the detectives pursuing him on a rapidly descending spiral towards the ultimate truth.
This open-ended structure also applies to the dialogues you’ll have with other characters. You can guide the tone and topic of each conversation and could, depending on your tact, unearth a clue, get the cold shoulder, or even upset a relationship. The opportunity to genuinely engage with the characters is thoroughly rewarding – and yes, before you ask, you can indeed instigate a little digital how’s-your-father ‘ and heightens the sense that the story responds continuously rather than making pre-set turns at a few key junctions.
Indeed, the strong characters and dialogue suggest that Fahrenheit’s writing is light-years ahead of most games. For the most part, it is. Later on though, when characters appear out of nowhere and unnatural plot twists arise, you begin to wonder ‘ did I miss something on my ‘unique’ path’ Or was the ending simply rushed’ Our personal experience of the ‘rubber-band’ story structure revealed a fair few plot holes before reaching an abrupt and somewhat hollow ending ‘ but with so many alternatives on offer, it’s by no means the only one possible.
The visual composition likewise infuses every scene with dramatic power but raises problems of its own. The “24″-style picture-in-picture shots bear all the hallmarks of the French art-house directors who assisted Quantic Dream. As striking as they are, they also hit the frame rate hard on the PS2 version, and the controls have a nasty habit of changing orientation with each camera cut ‘ meaning frequently.
Beyond the usual third-person exploration though, the game is slightly less ambitious, being largely a Dragon’s Lair-style interactive movie featuring coloured ‘Simon Says’ lights. The uncanny resemblance of the old Simon toy is mere coincidence we’re sure. It’s not quite as bad as the early 90’s CD-ROM games it suggests – the challenge is real enough ‘ but the same old problems still apply. Concentrating on the lights makes the real action so hard to follow that they begin to feel more intrusive than interactive. It’s patently not an involving style of gameplay either, serving only to distance you from sequences that could be better realized as playable action stages. Truth be told it sometimes feels as though someone is indulging his directorial aspirations at the expense of gameplay.
Another possibility is that Quantic Dream just aren’t very good at action. One or two half-hearted stealth sections and some target practice are all you get, and they’re all woefully inept ‘ much like similar sections in the developer’s original effort, Omikron – The Nomad Soul.
