Game-Engine has recently played through the entirety of Indigo Prophecy/Farenheit, Quantic Dream’s second game and in a spoiler filled analysis of the game, we give their views on what they think of the game now it’s all finished. We recommend you watch the video series in full here.
Here is the full playlist for your viewing…pleasure?
When we came to the end of our Indigo Prophecy journey, I went back and had a look at my half-way review, which I’d managed to write approximately half way through the game by some strange coincidence. You may of already guessed what Matt, Stevie and myself think of Indigo Prophecy through our commentary on the videos, but I’ll attempt to flesh out my views at least on what was going through my head whilst playing…apart from Beep…Beep…Beep…
The Quick Time stuff is crap. Boring, long winded and most apparent of all, frustrating. How many times did we fail a long sequence and realise ‘damn, we’re going to have to do this all again’? The answer, too many. If, bit of behind the scenes magic here folks, we were to piece together all the time we’d stopped the tape and played the game off camera just so we could get onto the next section, you’d be looking at around one and a half hours of extra footage. It was that bad.
I was throwing myself around the room in pent up, controller throwing rage at the fact that no matter what I did, especially on the now infamous “A” and “D” track and field events, I couldn’t get it to work. We sat around the TV thinking “maybe it’s just a steady pace”…No, wasn’t that. “Just hit them as fast as you can”…50% of the time it wasn’t that. So it left us in a really difficult position of not being able to progress through a story, which at first, really drew us into the action.
Oh the mop scene, we started off so confidently
That’s not to say the entire control scheme was broken, we could see where the potential lay. The gesture based system for actions usually worked OK, but whenever there was a slight complication of the approach, for example the infamous “mop” scene in episode 001, it came crashing down around us. Some say that the best platform to play this game on is a PS2 or PC with a gamepad, but the fact we were using a mouse and keyboard surely couldn’t of affected us that much more. Once I got used to the movement around the environments, it didn’t really affect me too much, even on scenes where I felt under pressure, but as you watch the vids you may notice there are times when I select the complete opposite gesture to what the guys suggest. This wasn’t because I thought they were ignorant idiots…obviously, but because it just didn’t quite respond right.
I’ve harped on so far about many of the negatives of the control, and that is, from reading forum posts, articles and post mortems on the game, justifiable. I’m going to leave the biggest controversy of them all at the moment, the plot, and instead focus on the more superficial elements of the game. I quite like the games presentation. I think it works in a way that many games fail, creating a series of unique environments, which may feel closed off, actually contain a lot of attention to detail, necessary in a game such as this. Whilst, again, we poked fun at the facial animations, some shaky voice work (having said that, it’s still better than most games five years later) and the crude effects IP employs, it’s a good effort from a title where graphical ‘showiness’ was not really Quantic Dream’s aim.
Well, I’ve saved up for a it. Time to analyse the biggie. The plot of Indigo Prophecy is very much like the roller-coaster “Oblivion” at UK theme park Alton Towers. You wait in line patiently, begining to get excited about what is going to happen; you get strapped in, ready to go on one hell of a ride. For those unfamiliar, it takes to you to the top of a nearly vertical drop, holds you there for about 10 seconds, then drops you down into a pit, but then ends. With little more than a gentle curve to the station. Sure, not too shabby you may say. But now imagine that gentle curve force-feeding pills down your neck, attacking you with artificial intelligence, ancient murderers, artifacts and giving you”Matrix” esque skills. Sounds better than it was.
I’m going to mirror what most people say about the plot. Great introduction, genius in-fact. Does a really good job at building tension, confusion and is brilliant at absorbing you into the plot of the game. But then some giant green cockroaches appear. And we begin to hit that curve. All of a sudden the “murder mystery” does become “murder madness” (it’s almost as if we planned it, we didn’t), as we are thrust into jumping onto choppers to escape cops, fighting angels and being all undead. The bad thing is that it doesn’t stop there.
This looks serious, but the end of the game gets very silly, in a bad way
Starting about the time you learn about the Mayan ritual, the Indigo Child and the “Orange Clan” the story goes off on a tangent to destruction. Character development may of not existed in the first half, as it doesn’t matter as soon as the Wachowski Brothers took control of David Cage and infected it with some sort of plot deficiency virus. Tyler vanishes without a trace, other than ‘Florida’ or ‘Stays behind’, with the option we picked of leaving to go to Florida being no more rewarding. In fact, Tyler, apart from some of the light hearted, borderline stereotyped, moments he provided to the game and our playthrough, needn’t of existed.
Carla started as an interesting character, and remained one till the end, just in a drastically different way. A serious and down to business detective, with some relationship hang ups, she endeared herself to us by suffering through claustrophobia and we felt we got to see all sides of Carla. But then we really did see all sides of Carla, without even playing the uncensored European version. The sudden ‘blossoming’ of romance in the last thirty minutes of the game, “I love you Lucas” and then *whabam* they go the whole way seemed forced, fake and out of character. Carla’s character loses all her intergrity and as her forced relationship with Lucas appears, the one between the player and Carla vanishes. Marcus (Lucas’s brother in case you’d forgotten) would not approve of this end of world love in, if only he’d got the chance to develop as a truly morally torn character between his faith and brother, and never got a farewell, last been seen, with no extra dialogue, sitting in a subway station with a bunch of homeless people.
Lucas is a confusing character to judge. as a protagonist who has inadvertently committed a murder and usually lives normal life, he is easy to connect with. We could all suspend our disbelief and put ourselves in Lucas’s unfortunate shoes. When we discover he is a computer technician is a bank, we try and look over the strange hallucinations and, to a degree, feel we understand him. But as I mentioned before, as soon as cockroaches appear, things look iffy and keep getting iffier. Perhaps the only thing I can say is that you perhaps stay closest to Lucas in terms of feeling his fear and confusion at what is happening to him, and his frustration at his brother’s failure to connect with him, his simmering love between his ex-girlfriend and his sudden burst of undead love with Carla… OK, perhaps not then. The flaws in Lucas’s character, that of a lack of real questioning, perseverance and common sense often going out the window with the options you were given, but out of all the characters, he rightly has the most depth.
Hmm....Yeah.... Most Definitely our favourite character
And finally, Tyler, Arguably our favourite character, perhaps for all the wrong reasons. It’s a real shame we never give our “stuck in the 70′s” cop a proper send off, as in our game he went off to Florida with nothing more than a faded black screen. From the first time we saw the reluctant Tyler clamber out of the car outside Doc’s Diner, moaning about the cold, the time and Carla’s determination, we knew he was our man. His ‘funky’ walk, his chilled nature and his bedroom manner won us over, with a stereotypical giggle all the same. We didn’t connect with Tyler as a character, he was just an awesome ‘dude’ and really he should of been given more time during the final few hours of the game, he comments as a crazed AI flew into the sky, special forces in pursuit, and a wanted murderer running along a wall. It would of been legendary.
That’s about all I can say about Indigo Prophecy, we embarked on this process as a bit of an experiment for us, I was relatively interested in the game, firstly because it was unique, secondly because of Heavy Rain being released not long after we started. Speaking of which, you can see the spark in Indigo Prophecy that develops into fully fledged and well thought out ideas in Heavy Rain, the multiple screen “24″ concept, character development and cross over and a further refinement of the quick time event mechanics.
I’d say the ending of Indigo Prophecy leaves it open for a sequel, to a degree. Whilst the Indigo Child has been ‘saved’, there is still Carla and Lucas’ Baby who has been exposed to the Chroma. I’m thinking that the technology that powers Heavy Rain could well make a really cool supernatural fantasy of a game, something *SPOILER ALERT GUYZ* Heavy Rain is not. Of course, the chances of us seeing another game based on Indigo Prophecy is slim, but it’s most definitely an experience, but whether it is worth playing or not, that, is another question.
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Josh Dean
Josh came to Game-Engine after running several other “web destinations” into the ground with constant re-designs and feature sets. After founding a website based about games, which again, suffered the fate of a perfectionist, yet poor, designer, Game Engine was created as a way to channel those energies in the direction of a poor, vunerable website. Afer co-founding Game Engine on a historic moment in intergalatic history, Josh turned his attention to web development yet again, muddled through it, and then started to “write” about what is probably his most normal interest, video games. Now Josh has expanded into poorly recorded screen captures and talking into cameras with painstaking conviction, as well as keeping up playing a lot of video games, then claiming that they are either ‘awesome’ or ‘rubbish’.
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