Indigo Prophecy

I've been curious about Indigo Prophecy (also released under the name Fahrenheit) since I played Quantic Dream's first game, Omikron. Omikron was an interesting adventure game that, unfortunately, had crappy FPS and fighting games as an integral part of the experience. Indigo Prophecy is also an interesting adventure game, and this time, only has a little bit of crappy gameplay impeding an otherwise great experience -- but more on that later.

In brief, this is a great but flawed narrative experience. Emphasis on "narrative" -- the game aspects of the game are minimized, mostly to the experience's benefit. In many ways, this is an adventure game, but unlike most examples of the genre, the puzzle solving, pixel hunting, and tree exploring aspects are almost completely eliminated. Instead, the game puts pacing in front of exploration -- many elements of the game have a timed aspect to them, keeping you moving forward through what feels more like a cinematic experience, with the game elements mostly in the service of breaking down the barriers to your emotional involvement in the story.

So what does that mean? While there are non-timed, exploratory elements, a large part of the actual story of the game is told in dialogue sequences with a time element. A character speaks to you, and then you get two to five different keywords that will lead to dialogue from your character. You have some amount of time -- usually on the order of a few seconds -- to make a decision about dialogue, and you'll usually get to explore about half of the conversation options before the game proceeds forward. The conversation tree won't let you miss crucial information, but ticking clock means that the conversations feel more "normal" -- you can't go outside of game time to obsess over the right decision, so the pacing of the conversation is maintained.

Another way the story unfolds is in action sequences, which (with two notable exceptions) consist of tapping keys in sequence while you watch the action sequence unfold. The most typical way this happens is a kind of "Simon Says," where you tap left/right/up/down keys to match a sequence you see on the screen. This is actually more effective then you might think -- often the directions correspond with the actions on the screen, so you (a) are getting the adrenaline reaction of reflex reactions while you watch a well-choreagraphed wire fu scene, and (b) are getting reinforcement between your actions and your characters actions, without actually getting bogged down all the way into an action game. You're not playing an action game, you're playing an adventure game, so not having to switch gears into a totally different kind of gameplay experience works well.

There's another gameplay element: a sanity meter for each character. Various actions you perform can cause improvements or disruptions to the well-being of the characters. Letting sanity hit zero will cause failure. What's interesting is that one of the ways to improve sanity is in fact to attempt to do normal, everyday things in the face of the horrible events that are unfolding in front of you. Drinking water or coffee, for example, can calm you down. Going to the bathroom.

There's almost no getting stuck in inventory puzzles or logic puzzles -- puzzles are there, but the pacing remains steady and forward moving. However, there are two exceptions to these gameplay elements, one good, one bad. The good one uses the elements above in conjunction with the puzzle solving elements in a well-welded way in order to convincingly simulate being claustrophobic in a scary basement. The bad attempts to replicate Metal Gear Solid-style "sneaking," but in a really poor way. You can't skip it, and since you can't save your incremental progress, you end up hitting a metaphorical brick wall.

While we're talking about the bad, there's also a storytelling nit to pick -- there's a point about 2/3 of the way through where it felt like they knew where wanted to get to, and couldn't quite connect it up. There's also a weird resolution to one of the emotional journeys in the game. But these are minor nits -- overall, I really enjoyed the story.

So much of this could just be "watching cut scenes" -- when you get right down to it, you aren't influencing the story direction in any way. The straight hallway of story that you're following is perhaps more obvious here than in other games, but, instead of attempting to misdirect you from the fact that you're riding a story on rails, you're instead invited to just feel more emotional engagement with the cutscenes as you watch them. You're making minor flavoring choices to the story as it unfolds, but that supplies a substantial amount of weight.

Another interesting note is the way you pick options and interact with the environment -- you click the button, and then push mouse in the appropriate direction. This is usually intentionally matched up with a direction that makes sense for the action -- down for sitting, left or right for opening things to the left or right -- and again, this subtle echo of the physicality helps with the suspension of disbelief.

The story unfolds in a parallel way -- you play both as a man who commits a violent act while in a trance state, and is now trying to find out why, and as the cops chasing him down. I feel like I should say something clever about this, but mostly what I have to say is that I liked it a lot. The best bit is when the two sides confront each other in an interrogation -- it really works.

Obligatory comment on graphics & audio: the voice acting is great. The graphics are clearly designed to play on a PS2, so they suffer for that (mostly in terms of low-res textures). But there's still some great visual composition (lots of great snowy scenes), and wonderful motion capture and facial animation. It took me a while to find the graphic options on the PC version, but once I turned them all way the hell up, I was really happy with how it looked.  10:51:44 PM  (comments [])   

More Eiffel Tower shots:

This was the view from our street -- pretty incredible to see after each day of wandering the town.

We saw this spotlight from time to time -- this view is from the open area in front of Invalides, as we walked from the metro station to our hotel.  10:47:53 AM  (comments [])   

Misc Paris pictures -- meandering thoughts to follow. I'm still sort of seven hours in the future, so the gray day outside isn't helping my wakefulness.

Edit: some captions & blah blah for the pictures.

Le Tour Eiffel. One of the great features of our hotel was that you could see the tower from the street. At night, on the hour, the lights would flash in a sparkly pattern that was really incredible.

The St. Chapelle chapel -- the chapel used by the royal family. Some of the most incredible stained glass. I was pretty happy with how my pictures came out this time -- my 1997 pictures were pretty underexposed and blurry.

Random mood shot over the river Seine.

Along the street bordering the north side of the Louvre.

The pyramid outside the Louvre, and part of the Louvre itself. We didn't actually go in, this trip (we saw the Pompideau instead), but we ended up near here at dusk and took some pictures outside.

The catacombs under Paris. These are eerie and humbling -- a little further on, there's an ossuary where they moved the bones of the dead after the graveyards had, well, filled up after hundreds of years. The bones are just, well, stacked in elaborate crosses and layers.  3:08:36 PM  (comments [])   

Palm TX, one month later

So, it's been a little over a month. And I thought I'd say that I continue to be delighted with this device. It retains the charm & functionality of the original PalmPilot Pro that I fell in love with a decade ago, but fixes any gripes I might ever have had with the device -- connectivity, a big, bright screen, plenty of memory. My mother-in-law has a Tungsten E2, so I was reminded what Palm-life is like when the writing area isn't "live," and it just reaffirmed to me how much I like the software-based writing area on the TX. Also, now that I have gotten the hang of using the "todo by date" view, I'm finding it to be an incredible way of managing my task list -- things I'm not going to do today get rescheduled to the future, and then they disappear from my mental clutter space, to reappear tomorrow or next week or whenever.

Plus, it has a kick-ass game of solitaire.

Ben has lent me one of his keyboards for my upcoming Paris trip, so I anticipate I'll be using the TX to capture travelogue notes, and then using the laptop later to pull them together with pictures for blog entries.  11:55:03 AM  (comments [])   

I sucked through A Feast for the Crows on my PGH trip only to discover Carrie had inadvertently also bought the book the same day. Doh! Fix't now. The book was excellent, but I'm definitely missing seeing half of my POV characters. I won't say more, because some people who read this are still reading it.

I'm three hours into the latest Wheel of Time. I didn't reread the other books first this time, so I'm relying on Google to remind me of where we last left some of these characters (and who other ones were). This led me to the following interesting information: supposedly, the current book is the next to last book. It seems hard to believe, but if true, gives me some hope for the series.

As I suspected, WoT is tremendously improved by audio book form -- the ponderous pace works better as a radio serial than as a "OMG I MUST FINISH THIS IN TWO DAYS TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT" obsessive print experience.

Here's the core thing to know about how WoT and SoIaF differ: in SoIaF, we see many children who -- due to horrible, soul-crushing circumstance -- are forced to grow up beyond their years and act like adults. In WoT, we see many adults -- some of whom, through their magical arts, are hundreds of years old -- act like petulant, spoiled children. In listening to this latest Jordan book, and hearing yet another Aes Sedai whine in her internal monologue about how she's not being given her proper awestruck respect, I realized this was a big part of what turned me off the series in the first place.

Still, one more book after this to go -- maybe I'll stick around and see where he takes me.  10:27:15 AM  (comments [])   

Misc

Am in Pittsburgh. Lack of snow, despite in being November, makes me v. sad. When else am I going to see snow? Eastern Standard Time not yet exerting hold over me that it should. Forgetting to set laptop time zone until 45 minutes ago not helping.

The latest Song of Ice and Fire George R R Martin tome came out today. Am v. sad that Roy Dotrice did not do the audio book narration. Decided to cut to chase and buy the hardback edition to read on the plane, esp. since Carrie is also now hooked. Am so far quite pleased -- hoping against hope to be done by time I get back so that there will be no contention for book.

New Wheel of Time crack is also out. Carrie not hooked on these, and even I am beginning to bitterly resent bookshelf space taken up by them. Dear Robert Jordan: advance plot more in each book. Thank you. Picked up in audio book form so as to reduce insult/injury.

About 40% done with Indigo Prophecy. LOVE IT, even though there are some infuriating design decisions. Back with cheers & jeers once I finish it. This may cause me to go back and re-pick up The Longest Journey and Grim Fandango.

Nearly all items with me on trip can be charged via USB/FireWire on the laptop: phone (mini-USB), Palm (weird USB multi-adapter), iPod. PSP has mini-USB but fails to accept charge from it -- shame on you, Sony, shame on you. Weird hydra-vibe coming off laptop -- must avoid angering elder gods.

Dear Texas: you suck. GG being a bunch of narrow-minded jackasses.  12:33:43 AM  (comments [])