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Previous in Game Reviews: Indigo Prophecy: First Impressions | Next in Game Reviews: Mass Effect: Greg Zeschuk WIRED Interview |
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Indigo Prophecy is, at its heart, a mystery story. Well, two mystery stories, really. The first is, “Why did Lucas kill that man in the bathroom?” The second is, “What in the name of Uwe Boll’s tiny malformed soul happened to the plot of this game?”
The first act plays like a psychological drama written by M. Night Shyamalan. (The Sixth Sense.) The second act plays like a stupid action movie by Jerry Bruckheimer. (Armageddon, National Treasure.) The third act is a swirling vortex of disjointed blatherskite, as if from the mind of Ed Wood. (Plan 9 From Outer Space.)
The first third of the game is a careful exploration of actions and consequences. The plot moves forward through conversation and examination of the game world. Lucas is trying to unravel what happened to him, why he blacked out, why he killed that man in the bathroom, and why he’s having strange dreams and visions.
Meanwhile Carla and Tyler – the police – are investigating the murder and slowly realizing that it is one of many. Over the years there have been several strange, seemingly unrelated murders. One person will kill a total stranger in broad daylight with three stabs to the heart. The murderer then (usually) kills himself. What is the connection between these crimes? What is driving these people to kill? And why is Lucas special, in that he didn’t kill himself afterwards? This is a compelling setup and those questions do a good job of driving the player through the first third of the game.
A lesser site might simply assert that the plot was lacking, without offering any supporting evidence. I will demonstrate its shortcomings by simply writing it all down and allowing you to read it for yourself. At this point we pass the signpost marked, “Here there be spoilers.” This is assuming it is possible to “spoil” the plot of a game which is already rotten.
Let us begin this grim work now:
They have The Oracle looking for the Indigo Child, who is a little girl with a perfectly pure soul who has never been incarnated, and thus she… holds all the secrets to life. (It is exceptionally difficult to get through these scenes without shouting “forty-two!” at the game.) If she tells the Orange Clan her secrets, they will gain godlike powers and rule the Earth, “enslaving all of humanity.” (Which seems to come after killing everyone. I’m wondering if they thought this through?)
Questions may come to mind. If she has “never been incarnated” then why is she currently uh, incarnated? I do not think that word means what they think it means. How does having a pure soul lead one to having all the secrets of the entire universe? How does knowing those secrets lead to godlike powers? Why doesn’t the girl herself have any powers whatsoever, if her knowledge is so potent? What exactly does the Orange Clan want with the Earth, anyway?
We’re dealing with a fictional reality with no discernible rules, bad guys with no motivation, and prophecy with no purpose. The answer to all of the player’s questions is thus: Shut up and do another action sequence.
I guess I should have warned you before we got started that this is an enormous post. I have divided it into four pages. This is a first for this site. I do trust the operation of the page links is obvious.
Previous in Game Reviews: Indigo Prophecy: First Impressions | Next in Game Reviews: Mass Effect: Greg Zeschuk WIRED Interview |
Sweet mercy. 61 comments!
I, for one, thank you for selflessly throwing yourself on this fizzing potato-masher of a game. I will certainly keep my distance.
Oh, and happy memorial day! :D
The Nomad Soul was another good QD game, though it too had a few moments that were just like “what…?”. I skipped Indigo Prophecy, but I like the kinds of things they are trying to do.
it’s hard to imagine how someone talented enough to write the first act could make the egregious blunders we witness in the third
I think it might just be a question of the Mystery Paradox. “You’ve Just Killed a Guy and you Don’t Know Why” is an awesome setup for a game, but the only ending that game is ever going to have is going to be “So … that’s why you killed that guy” which is never going to live up to the initial idea.
There’s also the simple fact that being *talented* in no way precludes being *crazy*.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Hah, great summary! I laughed several times and I feel like I got most of the (comedic) value of the game in 0.1% of the time.
I played Indigo Prophecy and echo everything you say here. I kept playing mostly because I kept hoping it’d return to that brilliant first act. The beginning is utterly absorbing and just so different and new and special. And then it goes rapidly down hill from there.
I believe there were supposed to be one or two chapters between two and three which were cut for some reason, so this is basically what happened.
I’ve never played it myself, so it sounds like including them would have simply made the transition less jarring rather than actually improving the plot.
For my part, I think the game would be much stronger if it was just the Oracle conducting crazy-ass rituals in the present day. The designers seem to feel that that answer isn’t quite momentous enough to justify the build-up (and to be fair what could?), and so they keep adding layer after layer… the Oracle’s working for this conspiracy… and then there’s another conspiracy… and it’s all about this child… and then WOO IT’S LIKE THE END OF HIGHLANDER… and by the end it becomes this ludicrous house-of-cards plot structure which can’t help but fall down hard.
Oh, a couple more things:
- I believe that David Cage has gone on the record as saying that the end of the game is horrible. They apparently put most of their effort into the first act (and really, you can tell), reasoning that it’s the early potions of a game which really get people hooked. Which is fair enough, but when the follow-up is this bad it’s like being served a delicious appetiser in a restaurant which is followed up by a turd sandwich for the main course and, for dessert, a knee to the groin.
- I have to say, Carla and Lucas having sex was easily the most irritating plot element for me too. Let’s put aside the whole undead thing. From Lucas’s point of view, his ex-girlfriend has just died, and Carla is the woman who until recently has been trying to arrest him for a murder which, OK, he did commit, but not under his own will. From Carla’s point of view, this is a guy that until really quite recently she was convinced was a cold-hearted murderer. Are they really going to get the hots for each other that quickly? It’s the point in the game where the previously-decent characterisation gets thrown out of the window entirely and we are left with howling, screaming madness.
Oh yes, and one last thing – did you get the easter egg where you can unlock a video of David Cage dancing with Carla in her underwear? (Er, she’s in her underwear, Cage is not).
It’s more than a little creepy.
You make me laugh so much reading about it that I almost want to play it just to witness the ludicrousness… _almost_. Sounds like the 3 stooges on acid.
Would it be worth playing the first act and chucking the disk in the bin though?
Don’t forget (if I recall correctly), in that list, 5 = 7.
Also, don’t a few months pass between the 2nd and 3rd acts, during which time Carla and the protagonist fall in love? Slightly less… screwed up.
Okay, I thought vampire sex was the most disgusting form of undead copulation. I stand corrected. I think I could make myself drink blood before I could make myself have sex with a guy who needs rigor mortis to get an erection.
I bet what happened was schedule pressure. Good writing is slow, and I bet they ran out of time.
o.O
And now I have a frame of reference for “Indigo Prophecy Syndrome” as explained by Ben Croshaw.
I also now have the urge to go back and check my story writings to be sure they don’t take such drastic and odd turns during the plot work
You should email David Cage and ask him if the trip he went on at the end was worth his professional integrity. That sounds absolutely horrible.
Though I’d like to play the first half or so, I think.
“I do trust the operation of the page links is obvious”
When looking at the article (http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1670) yes, but from the main page (http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/) there is no ‘>>’ next link. That would help to reduce the flow-break of going to the second page.
Fahrenheit(no I didnt play indigo prophecy,thank god,since all fahrenheit I played lacks is dumb cenzorship) is….well,a weird game.It has an excelent gampelay.It has dialogs that you have to think through fast(especially the one where carla is interogating lucas,I felt like I was the one being interogated and sweating in that chair).The story begins in such a marvelous way,and unfolds quite well.And the characters are real.You are playing them and you can feel their different personalities,you can merge with them.Of course,the action sequence where lucas faces weird monsters are marvelous,and the whole time you wonder if it is just him going crazy,or is he the only one seeing the thruth.
But then….Oh boy,then it hits the fan!The game ends so fast,and it crams everything in such a small time frame that it induces vomiting!It is funny for me to say this,since I did GM a few cyberpunk campaigns that have demons and robots,sentient AI and magic,but these two just dont fit here.
And that kung fu crap!It was fine when lucas did all those crazy things in his mind,and it worked when he evaded police(maginally worked),but thats the limit!Flying kung fu and kamehameha waves dont fit here!!!!
And the love between lucas and carla!!!!Why?!!We have characters with so much emotions,we learn so much about them,we guide them,we have heartbreaking talks between tyler and his wife,between lucas and tifani,and then this crap!!A girl he loves so much,with whom he still shares a bond(and with whom he resparked the relationship,if you play through that path),died not even 24 hours ago,and he has sex with a complete stranger that hunted him for the last week?!!And she has sex with a zombie just because?!!!!!
Jade(when the hell did we learn her name anyway?There was no scene where lucas finally found out her location,even though we had a very long scene for carla to match his fingerprints and the paper)is….Well,like shamus said,a piece of luggage.Making a human being as the only thing to stop the apocalypse didnt work in fifth elemnt,and it works even less here.Especially since this human being is a vegetable.
But still,the gameplay and the begining of the game are so awesome that Id still put this game very high above the rest that we got these days.Id still recomend the game to anyone.If you have money and no idea what to play,try fahrenheit.Despite everything bad in it,you still wont regret the purchace.
Dave: Yes. The page navigation is wonky. I can’t seem to get Wordpress to do the sensible thing. When you’re on the front page it doesn’t know that you’re also looking at page 1 of that particular article. The is the “read the rest of this article” link, and the “pagebreak”, and I can’t make them place nice together.
Hopefully I can figure out how these are supposed to work. I do like the idea of breaking long posts up into many pages.
A Hitchhiker’s reference AND a Princess Bride reference on the same page! *sniff* I’m so happy… ^_^
I was thrown off by how melancholy he was in the last scene. He has superpowers, a hawt girlfriend and he just saved the world. It should be time to party down!!!
LOL
I was wondering what your take was going to be on this. I personally liked the game – the first act contains several of the most memorable and most suspenseful scenes I have ever seen in video games.
I played this game like a year ago, and I vividly remember how awesome the mystery/investigation scenes where. The third act is a blur, and I hardly remembered anything from it with exception of the zombie sex. :P I guess I must have blocked it out or something.
you can go to
http://fromearth.net/LetsPlay/Fahrenheit/
if you want to see the plot in better detail.
I think there’s something in Dan Hemmens’ point that almost any resolution to that early central mystery which be disappointing by comparison – still, I think that if they’d stuck with the Mayan Wizards, and just left it at that, it would have merely been enjoyable hokum. It would have been easy enough to say that the players controlling the previous ‘murderers’ had forgotten to wash their hands, or failed a few too many quick time events – when parts of the early game are quite hard, explaining the whole thing as due to the radioactive artefact that he was exposed as a child is… silly.
I mean, Mayan Wizards doing it is hokey, but if they’d stuck with that, even the whole Indigo Child nonsense wouldn’t have been so bad. But the thing ends up suffering from what the Turkey City Lexicon calls the Tabloid Weird – bizarre and nonsensical mixes of things.
To be fair… the whole Zombie!Sex scene can be seen as making a kind of sense, with the two of them falling in love during the month-long time skip. On the other hand, THE TWO OF THEM FALL IN LOVE DURING THE MONTH-LONG TIME SKIP. Having *successfully* got us to invest in these characters, having a major and dramatic change as that happen off camera is utterly unforgivable. Also – when the first part of the game is all about making choices, and at the end you have multiple endings. But the multiple endings aren’t based on choices, but require you to fail certain parts of the final confrontations.
Really, this game hurts more than a game that’s out-and-out terrible. You just don’t care about a game that’s totally awful.
I recently played this game. I must say, it’s a rollercoaster ride. One where there is great buildup, and suddenly, halfway through the first loop there’s no more rails and you’re lucky you packed a chute.
In addition to the things listed by shamus what I found quite jarring is Lucas’ brother. Markus. His character is the 4th most important in my opinion. (after the 3 playables). He’s a priest and he struggles between his faith and his family ties. You can even have him try to turn Lucas in. Quite an interesting character. He even saves lucas’ life in a freak storm in his apartment caused by the oracle. Then all of a sudden there’s a scene where you have to save his life because the oracle is in his church. You do this by calling him and, get this, telling him to lock himself in. So a kung fu mayan priest with supernatural powers can’t deal with a locked door…
For about 2 hours the only reason I knew I had saved his life was because I replayed the scene making some other choices and saw him die. Then all of a sudden, he is sitting with the leader of the invisibles in their hidout. HOW in the name of 42 did he get there? We dont know. He doesnt tell us. He just sits there. He doesnt even talk to his brother. You can talk to him with carla, but he just says some noncommital stuff. Another great character gone down the drain. Having used my chute I landed in a shark pond…
By page 3 of your recap I was absolutely convinced you were just screwing with us.
It scares me that you were not.
Hum.. perhaps it was a “Too god for that bastard” Tvtrope example..
“I think it might just be a question of the Mystery Paradox. “You’ve Just Killed a Guy and you Don’t Know Why” is an awesome setup for a game, but the only ending that game is ever going to have is going to be “So … that’s why you killed that guy” which is never going to live up to the initial idea.”
That’s the big problem with a lot of plotlines based around mysteries. It’s easier to create a sense of mystery than actually create a logical reason for the mystery. IMO, that’s a big problem with the J.J. Abrams and David Lynches out there- create a hook that draws the viewer in with quirky and detailed set-ups, let the audience members guess what’s occurring, and then try like hell to come up with an answer for all of the questions you yourself asked.
Unfortunately, many of these plotlines collapse and don’t come close to satisfying the anticipation. A good question would be, “Which games/tv shows/movies posed a really good mystery in the beginning AND then resolved them in a satisfactory manner?”
For my vote, I’d suggest the following as a few examples:
Planescape: Torment
Donnie Darko
Memento
And I’ve probably seen a hundred more that all crashed and burned.
Here’s a website that you should visit, Shamus, although it may take up ridiculous amounts of your time (I’ve already sunk at least 10 hours into it and have barely scratched the surface).
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MacGuffin
This
Was
Hilarious
Thank you :)
This sounds like the perfect game for me. I rarely play more than a third of the way through anything before losing interest, anyway.
Could the reason the AI from the 80s looked like Tron was because Tron came out in the early 80s. I actually started to play this game a few years back and stopped for some reason. Honestly I think I might try it out again just to watch the batshit crazy plot unfold.
What did you use for the red blobs in the last comic?
The red blobs are just splattered coffee, which I colorized after taking the picture. The first pics I took didn’t really sell the “crazy” look I was going for. The coffee was right there, so I flung some around and that seemed to work.
Dear WalMart: Leave the sex, cut the rest. Thank you.
Seriously, that is messed up. Orson Scott Card has a rule for writing speculative fiction: only break one rule. This means if there is an ancient Mayan priest, then there are no government cabals. If there is a sentient computer, then it can’t raise people from the dead. Etc.
I loved the plot summary. It has a great MST3K feel.
I’m thinking along the lines of certain movies here such as “From Dusk Til Dawn” which abandons the plot as soon as the characters arrive at the bar. Or, more recently and with higher suitability due to it’s comic nature, “Hot Fuzz”.
I’d rather play Hot Fuzz as a game than the former, tho…
Even though hot fuzz has the same abandonment of all things logical as fahrenheit, (interesting, you can now find out which of your readers are american and which are european) there is one big difference: Hot fuzz knows its doing it, and uses it for comic purposes. Whereas fahrenheit goes nuts without noticing it is doing so. Furthermore, in hot fuzz you are watching other people go crazy. In a computergame I’m usually so immersed that I feel like I am behaving irrational at the end of fahrenheit. Worst thing is, the writers of the game are making me go irrational, I can’t control it myself.
Crazyness is fine as long as it serves comic relief, and more importantly, as long as it isn’t a character you are playing that goes gaga.
I played both Fahrenheit and Nomad Soul, and I enjoyed both. Not exactly for the amazing stories, since both went totally floopy after a while, but for what they attempted in gaming. Trying to focus slightly more on storyline and new gaming mechanisms.
Unfortunately I do think they bit of more than they could chew.
Anyway, I remember reading that Fahrenheit was initially designed to be an episodic game. They apparently had about half of it done when the budget went down the tubes and they were forced to rush the end and mash it all together to release it in one go.
I really, really, really hope that Heavy Rain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Rain) lives up to expectations and that they manage to get it “right” this time.
While Tron and neo superpowers were eye-roll-licious, the thing I hated most were definitely the love thing between Carla and Lucas.
“I love you Lucas!”
“I love you too… Uh, what’s your name again?”
And yeah, sub-zero loving, not a pleasant thought.
I haven’t played Fahrenheit, but I watched a walkthrough video of it on YouTube, which gave me an excellent idea of what to expect. I totally agree that the first half of the game was exquisite… The second half of it (events after Tiffany’s death) just left me going “What the hell?”
I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was supposed to a lot more to the game, content that would have allowed the relationship between Lucas and Carla to develop in a proper manner, but it was cut out due to time and/or budget constraints. A great shame, because I think the Purple Clan *could* have worked, if they hadn’t just thrown it in so haphazardly in the final half-hour of gameplay. Oh, and making them look different than some bright, neon-yellow colour would have helped too.
Oh I *so* want to run an RPG where the players have to find The Magic MacGuffin. Curse you!
I already knew about the romance between Lucas and Carla before coming into the recap, but thought it was a semi-innocuous romance.
However, now that I know that instead the romance is between an live woman and an dead (well, undead) man… eww. Suddenly, the Real-Time-Action-Event sex scenes from the European version become much less appealing, in a “I don’t want to be seeing this, much less playing it” sense.
To go totally off at a tangent….
I’m not sure I’d say Hot Fuzz abandons it’s plot…. I think it plot tightly controls everything that happens. It’s just that the logic of the world is mad action based…
@Count_Zero
Actually,that scene is just a cinematic.The real-time-action-event sex is only with tifany,and you can get it only if you play your cards right.
Well, that was… interesting. Thanks for making sure I never go near this game.
I have noticed a similar, if not as extreme, pattern in a number of TV shows. In these shows, usually around season finale time, they throw a massive twist into the plot, a twist which given the show’s and characters’ history makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and feels completely wrong and out of place. This twist does nothing to further or improve the plot, and apears to be only added for the sake of surprising the audience and saying a hearty “Ha! I bet you didn’t see THAT coming!” to the viewers. It seems that whichever show shocks the most viewers in a season wins. Could this be the effect Indigo was trying for?
… muttering stupid melodramatic nonsense.
But… that’s the most important superpower ever!
Excellent review, think I pass on this one.
Wowzers
…I rather liked The Fifth Element.
@Daemian Lucifer: Still, is the scene in question before or after the undeath?