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A Story Worth Telling
While most releases today rest comfortably in a defined genre of gameplay, every once in a great while, a game comes along that sets out to not only completely redefine a genre, but create it's own. Developer Quantic Dream's much anticipated Indigo Prophecy manages to do just that. With it's roots loosely grounded in point-and-click adventure, Indigo Prophecy melds together a strong narrative structure and innovative, interactive elements that augment the player's tie to the physicality of the characters' world in the story.
With it's emphasis on interactive storytelling, the story itself truly shines in originality and tone. You play through the somewhat twisted story from one of three characters at any given time, each character with it's own internal dialogue and mood. The main focus is around average man Lucas, who in the opening sequence, is seen convulsing and possessed in a bathroom stall of a diner. Moments later, seemingly unable to control his own actions, Lucas viciously attacks another patron in the restroom, stabbing him multiple times and killing him. Lucas awakes from his trance, horrified and dumbfounded, and it is then that the player takes control.
It is then that the opening sequence of gameplay gives an excellent taste of what players are in for. With a corpse, murder weapon, and blood stains all over your clothes and arms, you have to figure out how to escape - all the while, NYPD officers are sitting out in the diner enjoying coffee. A craftier murderer would probably hide the corpse in the stall, throw away the murder weapon, and wash up before casually walking out the front door as if nothing happened. Or, if you prefer, you could just run out of the bathroom without doing anything and jet out the back door. All of these individual actions are available, and every single decision the gamer makes has a chance of changing the direction of the story - sometimes to a quick game-over screen, and other times a dramatic shift in the character's mood or available options left for continuing the story. While a good 90% of the time, the changes are somewhat cosmetic and do little to alter the overall story arc, the interactivity of being able to affect the world in a non-linear way really helps pull the player into this creepy world.
Aside from Lucas, you also play through the game as two other characters: Detectives Carla Valenti and Tyler Miles, who are investigating the murder in question. This anticipation slowly mounts as how all the characters will eventually meet and conflict. Each of the characters is thoroughly developed, as the player learns intimate details about each of their lives and histories. Certain sequences in the game even deviate away from going forward in the story, and instead choose to flesh out the context of the lives of these characters - like an intense gym work-out session between Carla and Tyler that involves long button-mashing sequences (which in itself is interesting; the player will no doubt end up as tired as the two characters on screen). The effortless way in which the player interacts with and is pulled into the story is far beyond what most games today have to offer - rather than merely dumping random gameplay on top of a story, like the series Myst, there is seamless tie between interactivity and story.
Indigo Prophecy, if not already evident, is a lot of fun to play, mostly because of the engaging narrative. I couldn’t help but sit for hours in front of the screen straight to see what would happen next, which is something one would usually say for a good book rather than a video game. There isn’t much challenge per se; the only real difficult part is through trial-and-error in figuring out how to get past a sequence. There is an unlimited amount of lives, so the game doesn’t actively go out to piss the player off by making them start over from the very beginning - at the heart of it, Quantic Dream wants to get you through this experience. While occasionally I found myself working through some lengthy, annoying chapters, overall the gameplay was very enjoyable.
While certainly not perfect, Indigo Prophecy offers a fresh new style of interactivity and narrative. This game does something that most can only hope to do - not only let the player have fun, but inspire change in the current trend of story-driven games. Indigo Prophecy provides a solid base from which many future games can develop on - that is, to provide more relevant gameplay mechanics and how to create a world in which the player has limited yet satisfying control. The next step would be to see how much more complex these interactions can get and further the player can alter the world in which they inhabit. It all comes down to developers realizing that it’s not just gameplay that makes for satisfying experience.
