Creating a game with a good balance between gameplay and story can be a very difficult thing to pull off, if too much focus is on the gameplay then, while it can still be an enjoyable game, it ends up feeling very shallow, as if nothing has really happened. Of course, too much emphasis on story can also be a problem, particularly if the story is so ridiculous you find yourself yelling at the screen, pleading for some explanation of why what you are seeing is so stupid! Anyway, here's Fahrenheit...
Going into Fahrenheit I knew that its gameplay was built around quick time events, however I didn't realise exactly what that meant until I started playing. There are three main kinds of gameplay: what I'm going to be referring to as 'dicking around', dialogue scenes and the 'simon says' scenes. There is a lot of dicking around; in Fahrenheit, it is supposed to add to the immersion of the interactive film that the game so desperately wants to be. Between getting to the bloody point of each scene you have to walk around and do all of the stuff that would normally be done in cut scenes. Now, I know that this sounds like I am complaining about all the dicking around, but I didn't really 'hate' it. It did indeed add to some of the immersion of the game, searching for clues at crime scenes and wandering around looking for whatever the maguffin of the mission is was, at times, interesting and enjoyable. All other times though, it was either tedious or frustrating.
The mission that sticks out it my mind the most was one where I had to find a book that was in the same collection as another. You can find out the name and author of the book and the year it was published in one area, the floor of the library that books from that year can be found in another area, and the bookcase that that author's work is, in another area. I kept going to the area it was supposed to be in, not finding any context sensitive areas, checking the details again, going back because it was the right bookcase anyway and still not finding anything. It turns out that because I was still carrying the book I couldn't access any of the cases, the only reason I found that out was because I forgot to pick it up once after checking the details for the fortieth freaking time.
But dicking around is by no means all the game has to offer, in conversation you are given Mass Effect style dialogue choices, all fully voiced and all just slightly too ambiguous. You are given up to four options, each one word, which are chosen by flicking the right analogue stick in the given direction. Usually they just come down to asking questions to people, but while sometimes it doesn't matter what order you ask the questions in, other times some of the possible questions just never get asked or they never get answered. Obviously if something gets left out, it isn't necessary to the story, but I'm one of those people who likes getting the whole picture and having all of the possible information about what's going on, particularly with a story as convoluted as Fahrenheit's. The dialogue works well, most of the time, and the acting varies erratically, sometimes it is really good other times it's terrible.
The final aspect to the gameplay comes as 'Simon Says' minigames as a substitute for the traditional quick time events. During action scenes and occasionally dialogue scenes, two four colour "Simon" games pop up (I can't think of anything else to call them) and when they flash in a certain direction you need to flick either the left or right analogue sticks in said direction. These are generally pretty fun to do, especially when they become a bit more complex, but they are just far too easy. I mentioned that these sometimes appear during dialogue scenes, this is so that you can get more information out of characters, which works but the justification for how it works is pretty stupid.
Which, brings me to the story. Fahrenheit's story starts out great, the first scene is an under pressure kind of thing where you need to try and hide the body of the man you just killed against your will in a restroom. After disposing of the body and evidence you walk out the door and immediately see the exit, which you naturally will try and walk out of. The waitress stops you because you have not paid for your meal. You throw down some cash, catch eyes with a cop and walk out the door. In another game this would be done in a cutscene, in this game this is a part of the dicking around phase of the game. This is one of the times where the gameplay works really well and you can really feel like you are a part of the story. There are three main characters: the aforementioned man is named Lucas Kane, who works as an I.T. consultant at a bank; the other two characters are Carla Valenti and Tyler Miles, cops. Carla is your typical cliché cop chick who lives for the job and is pretty serious, Tyler is the cliché 'black cop'. Arrogant, plays basketball, owes people money and always late, he even has an afro and appears to be stuck in the '70s.
After escaping from the crime scene, the player quantum leaps into Carla, or Tyler if you choose (but I didn't because as soon as I saw him I knew what kind of character he would be and avoided him like the plague [not racist]). Now, you need to try and find the evidence from your own crime scene and chat to the witnesses and other cops on the scene. Basically you continue like this for a while, Carla and Tyler go on separate tangents following up evidence, while Lucas tries to figure out what happened to him. For the first few hours this works great, the mystery behind Lucas' apparent possession is intriguing and plays out like a supernatural suspense movie, he chats to his brother (who just so happens to be a priest) and then he finds a seer. All the while, the cop sections unfold in the same way a procedural cop show would (and I hate procedural cop dramas), they follow leads and uncover a bunch of evidence, there is an autopsy scene that reveals that the main arteries to the man's heart were all severed, Tyler even has an interrogation scene with Lucas (with you playing as Lucas) and it is a lot of fun trying to figure out the best answers. Their search eventually leads them to figuring out that Lucas was the one who killed the man in the restroom that fateful night. Sigh, then it all goes to shit. From this point on the review is going to get SPOILERTASTIC. You have been warned.
Carla and Tyler track down his apartment slam down the door and find the walls covered in blood, and pentagrams everywhere and a bunch of crazy ritualistic stuff everywhere, stuff that wasn't there when you last played as Lucas. The whole damn NYPD starts chasing Lucas down the street and eventually you get cornered by three cops each holding a gun right up to you, yelling for you to freeze. Using the wonders of plot convenient superpowers you manage to knock the guns out of the cop's hands, run away, dodge bullets and then a bunch of cars, jump onto the bottom of a helicopter, jump onto a moving truck, be totally fine, and then...then you jump onto a bridge and then onto a moving train. Someone on the Fahrenheit dev team was a Matrix fan I can tell you that. If you don't believe me here's a video:
I could go on describing the stupidity of the plot from this point on, it involves Mayans and the end of the world and is very, very stupid, but I don't see a lot of point to explaining it all. This was the game's shark jumping moment, and it was the first time I really got totally pulled out of the experience. I do, however, want to talk about the awkwardly crammed in romantic subplot. Romantic subplots are bad enough when they are unnecessary to the plot, but I usually let them slide if they exist for the majority of the game. After a couple of very stupid plot twists that involves Lucas dying and being 'resuscitated'; which is how the game explains it, though I don't really know what it means because the game didn't think that was important enough to mention; Carla meets up with Lucas and they agree to work together to save the world! Off-screen they seem to have fallen in love, and we are literally given no explanation for it. There is even a completely gratuitous sex scene that pretends it is artistic and deep by openly showing nipples, but since we don't have any context for their relationship, it just comes off as tacky and tasteless. In the epilogue, which is set only three months later, Lucas mentions that Carla is now pregnant from that night, and that she is his wife! Since Lucas was undead when they had sex and conceived this child, a lot of questions get raised. What exactly is going to happen to a child born from one living and one dead parent? Did Lucas get brought back to life after they saved the world? I don't think so because he is still as pale as a corpse in the final scene.
Bottom line: it is almost impossible for me to recommend this game to anyone. Fahrenheit is not a game for game-play enthusiasts its for story lovers, and I can't honestly recommend it for a connoisseur of story because of how bat-shit retarded it gets at the halfway point. The only person I can recommend this for is someone who wants to get good and angry about stupid writing.
Going into Fahrenheit I knew that its gameplay was built around quick time events, however I didn't realise exactly what that meant until I started playing. There are three main kinds of gameplay: what I'm going to be referring to as 'dicking around', dialogue scenes and the 'simon says' scenes. There is a lot of dicking around; in Fahrenheit, it is supposed to add to the immersion of the interactive film that the game so desperately wants to be. Between getting to the bloody point of each scene you have to walk around and do all of the stuff that would normally be done in cut scenes. Now, I know that this sounds like I am complaining about all the dicking around, but I didn't really 'hate' it. It did indeed add to some of the immersion of the game, searching for clues at crime scenes and wandering around looking for whatever the maguffin of the mission is was, at times, interesting and enjoyable. All other times though, it was either tedious or frustrating.
The mission that sticks out it my mind the most was one where I had to find a book that was in the same collection as another. You can find out the name and author of the book and the year it was published in one area, the floor of the library that books from that year can be found in another area, and the bookcase that that author's work is, in another area. I kept going to the area it was supposed to be in, not finding any context sensitive areas, checking the details again, going back because it was the right bookcase anyway and still not finding anything. It turns out that because I was still carrying the book I couldn't access any of the cases, the only reason I found that out was because I forgot to pick it up once after checking the details for the fortieth freaking time.
But dicking around is by no means all the game has to offer, in conversation you are given Mass Effect style dialogue choices, all fully voiced and all just slightly too ambiguous. You are given up to four options, each one word, which are chosen by flicking the right analogue stick in the given direction. Usually they just come down to asking questions to people, but while sometimes it doesn't matter what order you ask the questions in, other times some of the possible questions just never get asked or they never get answered. Obviously if something gets left out, it isn't necessary to the story, but I'm one of those people who likes getting the whole picture and having all of the possible information about what's going on, particularly with a story as convoluted as Fahrenheit's. The dialogue works well, most of the time, and the acting varies erratically, sometimes it is really good other times it's terrible.
The final aspect to the gameplay comes as 'Simon Says' minigames as a substitute for the traditional quick time events. During action scenes and occasionally dialogue scenes, two four colour "Simon" games pop up (I can't think of anything else to call them) and when they flash in a certain direction you need to flick either the left or right analogue sticks in said direction. These are generally pretty fun to do, especially when they become a bit more complex, but they are just far too easy. I mentioned that these sometimes appear during dialogue scenes, this is so that you can get more information out of characters, which works but the justification for how it works is pretty stupid.
Which, brings me to the story. Fahrenheit's story starts out great, the first scene is an under pressure kind of thing where you need to try and hide the body of the man you just killed against your will in a restroom. After disposing of the body and evidence you walk out the door and immediately see the exit, which you naturally will try and walk out of. The waitress stops you because you have not paid for your meal. You throw down some cash, catch eyes with a cop and walk out the door. In another game this would be done in a cutscene, in this game this is a part of the dicking around phase of the game. This is one of the times where the gameplay works really well and you can really feel like you are a part of the story. There are three main characters: the aforementioned man is named Lucas Kane, who works as an I.T. consultant at a bank; the other two characters are Carla Valenti and Tyler Miles, cops. Carla is your typical cliché cop chick who lives for the job and is pretty serious, Tyler is the cliché 'black cop'. Arrogant, plays basketball, owes people money and always late, he even has an afro and appears to be stuck in the '70s.
After escaping from the crime scene, the player quantum leaps into Carla, or Tyler if you choose (but I didn't because as soon as I saw him I knew what kind of character he would be and avoided him like the plague [not racist]). Now, you need to try and find the evidence from your own crime scene and chat to the witnesses and other cops on the scene. Basically you continue like this for a while, Carla and Tyler go on separate tangents following up evidence, while Lucas tries to figure out what happened to him. For the first few hours this works great, the mystery behind Lucas' apparent possession is intriguing and plays out like a supernatural suspense movie, he chats to his brother (who just so happens to be a priest) and then he finds a seer. All the while, the cop sections unfold in the same way a procedural cop show would (and I hate procedural cop dramas), they follow leads and uncover a bunch of evidence, there is an autopsy scene that reveals that the main arteries to the man's heart were all severed, Tyler even has an interrogation scene with Lucas (with you playing as Lucas) and it is a lot of fun trying to figure out the best answers. Their search eventually leads them to figuring out that Lucas was the one who killed the man in the restroom that fateful night. Sigh, then it all goes to shit. From this point on the review is going to get SPOILERTASTIC. You have been warned.
Carla and Tyler track down his apartment slam down the door and find the walls covered in blood, and pentagrams everywhere and a bunch of crazy ritualistic stuff everywhere, stuff that wasn't there when you last played as Lucas. The whole damn NYPD starts chasing Lucas down the street and eventually you get cornered by three cops each holding a gun right up to you, yelling for you to freeze. Using the wonders of plot convenient superpowers you manage to knock the guns out of the cop's hands, run away, dodge bullets and then a bunch of cars, jump onto the bottom of a helicopter, jump onto a moving truck, be totally fine, and then...then you jump onto a bridge and then onto a moving train. Someone on the Fahrenheit dev team was a Matrix fan I can tell you that. If you don't believe me here's a video:
I could go on describing the stupidity of the plot from this point on, it involves Mayans and the end of the world and is very, very stupid, but I don't see a lot of point to explaining it all. This was the game's shark jumping moment, and it was the first time I really got totally pulled out of the experience. I do, however, want to talk about the awkwardly crammed in romantic subplot. Romantic subplots are bad enough when they are unnecessary to the plot, but I usually let them slide if they exist for the majority of the game. After a couple of very stupid plot twists that involves Lucas dying and being 'resuscitated'; which is how the game explains it, though I don't really know what it means because the game didn't think that was important enough to mention; Carla meets up with Lucas and they agree to work together to save the world! Off-screen they seem to have fallen in love, and we are literally given no explanation for it. There is even a completely gratuitous sex scene that pretends it is artistic and deep by openly showing nipples, but since we don't have any context for their relationship, it just comes off as tacky and tasteless. In the epilogue, which is set only three months later, Lucas mentions that Carla is now pregnant from that night, and that she is his wife! Since Lucas was undead when they had sex and conceived this child, a lot of questions get raised. What exactly is going to happen to a child born from one living and one dead parent? Did Lucas get brought back to life after they saved the world? I don't think so because he is still as pale as a corpse in the final scene.
Bottom line: it is almost impossible for me to recommend this game to anyone. Fahrenheit is not a game for game-play enthusiasts its for story lovers, and I can't honestly recommend it for a connoisseur of story because of how bat-shit retarded it gets at the halfway point. The only person I can recommend this for is someone who wants to get good and angry about stupid writing.