Fahrenheit or Indigo Prophecy or Whatever the Cool Kids are Calling It Nowadays
Every time I buy an adventure game, I play it for about thirty minutes and hate myself. The mechanics of adventure games, even in a 3-D environment, are still hopelessly stuck in the 2-D age. I don't want to hunt pixels. I don't want to unravel a rope and use the fibers to weave a carpet, then hang that carpet on the wall (in the correct orientation, mind you) to activate a series of obscure events that eventually lead to the next, even more obscure puzzle. I have one word for that: puke.The other game mechanic that seems incredibly stale to me at this point is the typical first-person-shooter. Advance ten paces. Shoot someone. Repeat one billion times. Again: puke. The FPS genre, as a rule, has games with fantastic, 3-D environments and woefully shallow gameplay.
In 1999, Quantic Dreams released a game titled "Omikron." It was a wonderful failure and left an indelible perception of having been something very different. The introduction was embarrassingly bad, but then there was a transition and suddenly you burst into this futuristic cityscape, with a David Bowie song (recorded just for the game, and it was good) playing in the background, and it was just fantastic. It had this wonderful, vast sense of scale, and the city looked and felt very alive.
I guess it was an adventure, mostly, with a third-person perspective of your character. It didn’t feel like an adventure, though—it just felt like an experience, one that didn’t even really have a label.
It was, unfortunately, not a good game. The parts of the game where you walked around and investigated were very good. The combat sequences (which were not frequent, but had to be completed in order to continue) were absolutely awful because the control was some of the worst I’ve ever seen.
Still, in spite of all that, it was hugely ambitious and a wonderful failure. It was more interesting in its failure than ninety percent of successful games are.
I mention Omikron because Quantic Dreams just released a demo for their new project--Fahrenheit. Or Indigo Prophecy, because both of those names seem to be in use. For lack of a more precise description, it's an adventure game, but not in any way that I recognize. You get to explore a very detailed 3-D world from a third-person perspective, and there are no pixel hunts—if you see something that can be interacted with, a small graphic shows on top of the screen, indicating what direction to move the mouse to initiate the interaction. Some repetitive actions (like mopping a floor, for example), require the mouse movement to mimic the rhythm of the onscreen action. It’s an elegant design, and it feels very organic to be moving the mouse in that manner to influence the game. I’m oversimplifying how that works, but it’s the basic premise.
There are many, many paths that can be taken, even in the very short demo, and your actions (as explained in various descriptions of the game, and I only hope they’re right) genuinely influence the events. It’s also a very cinematic experience, including split-screens at critical moments to show action in two separate locations.
It’s the first time I’ve played a game in months and felt like I was seeing a hint of the future of gaming. Darwinia was a one-off, a brilliant work of art that won’t affect other designers because it was so tremendously unique, futuristic but incapable of imitation. Some of the techniques used in this demo, though, could be used by other designers to improve the immersion level of their games.
I can actually point to one game in the past as a lineage: Shenmue. If you ever played that game, you have a decent feel for what Fahrenheit feels like, although this experience seems more streamlined.
The demo is available all over, but here’s a link to the File Planet download:
http://www.fileplanet.com/155456/download/Indigo-Prophecy-Demo. Please be warned, as I mentioned previously, that this is a very short demo—I played it three different ways and was still done in less than half an hour. If you’d like to see the game, though, it’s still worth your time. The PC version is scheduled to ship in the U.S. on September sixth.
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