by:	October 25, 2005

Indigo Prophecy, known in the developer’s homeland of England as “Fahrenheit” is an interesting game. This, more than any other game—past the hours of cinematic moments in a Metal Gear Solid game and leagues past the interactive novel known as Shenmue, tries to create a sense that you are not playing a game, but rather allowing a story to unfold with the right actions. Not only that, the game has many different paths that you might take. The game is literally a movie more than it is an actual game. The game controls strangely, you investigate tons of incidents; you solve mysteries, and get into genuinely mature situations. The best thing about the game, despite some questionable game mechanics, lacking visuals, and sometimes-corny moments, is the story is actually impressively detailed and unraveled.

The game, like many games that try to be more about the story than the actual gameplay has a gloomy, often times depressing protagonist, Lucas Kane. He has a boring desk job, with woman problems, hobbies like you and I and apparently a connection to the unexplained. The game opens up with you in a bathroom at a diner—your wrist cut and bleeding on the floor, and someone or something comes over you—forcing you to lunge at a man in the bathroom, stabbing him with a knife you took off of the diner table. When you are done stabbing the man, the sense of being possessed escapes Lucas and from here you are introduced to the games quirky gameplay mechanics. Walking up to the lifeless man, you press up on the right analog and then by pressing L and R alternatively, you pull him into the bathroom stall. Once there then what do you do? Wash the blood off of your hands; get the mop against the wall to clean up the mess, or both? Anyways, as you are doing this, or as you are done in the bathroom, the game splits the screen, showing the police officer sitting at the diner bar, getting up to go to the rest room. The best way to describe it is how the show “24” splits up the cameras. Anytime this happens in the game, you can still control your character as well. Once you finally make it out of the diner, the game forks off to the other protagonist within the story. You will constantly be given several choices as Lucas. Depending on your choices you might get to the same story points in a variety of different ways, or you could completely skip some story points and go to different ones. You can even end the entire game in completely different ways.

Basically when you play the game you will have a game that will remind you of a lot of things such as CSI, The X-Files, and Shenmue. The gameplay is actually a lot like Shenmue’s, except the fact that it is more of pushing random buttons and moving the analogs in a direction when prompted to than it is any sort of action. When you move around it is “3D” controls meaning that you will have to push forward to move no matter what direction you are going, it will push you forward. It may take some getting used to, especially for people who have never played any sort of survival-horror game such as Residet Evil. The actual gameplay you might be prompted to push the left and right analog stick in different directions—in a sort of “Simon Says” mechanic that you might be familiar with if you played the Shenmue series. It can get a bit annoying, especially at five to ten minute long sessions of these “quick time events” in the game, especially since you end up concentrating on that rather than the scene happening.

Enter a few hours later as the graveyard shift detectives for the NYPD come in and try to solve the mystery. You are now introduced to detectives Carla Valenti and Tyler Miles. It takes a bit to get used to these two, but you can switch between both, and must in order to advance the story. You learn the quirks and characteristics of each, and while it can sound like drivel at times, like Kane, they are very deep characters.