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indigozealFor his stream's latest feature title, supergreatfriend has been playing Indigo Prophecy, and, man, not even live chat can save this game. If, like I was, you are largely unfamiliar with Indigo Prophecy, you're probably aware of its reputation for completely wrecking a supposedly good plot with an insane, intractable twist. I haven't any idea of what this twist is, but I take issue with the "good plot" assertion; it's a distillation of every Hollywood thriller/cop movie over the last twenty years, with hardly an original thought, scene, or line to be found, spaced out over an interminable length. When it finally got to a scene that should've been grandiosely outre (murder suspect chased by giant hallucinatory ticks through cubicles in his IT office), I couldn't have been more bored.
David Cage is praised first and foremost for how much his games play like interactive films, but, paradoxically, the more Indigo Prophecy succeeds in its goal of emulating a movie, the more boring it is. It's the same "I've seen this already" problem with the Empire plots, but I think here that it's a problem of concept itself more than execution: the end goal of the recent triple-A push to make games supposedly feel like movies is to make an inferior copy of a product I've experienced a thousand times before. Games aren't going to get better at being movies than movies are, and chasing that goal without embracing at least some of the strengths of the medium is just going to make your work seem as glaringly derivative as it is. The only gamelike interactive things Indigo Prophecy boasts (besides occasional "choose which cliche the droning plot will follow next" minor story branching) are lengthy distractions - play your guitar; put an LP on your turntable; wash your hands. Not a bonus, when the pacing is glacial as it is.
As mentioned, I've been playing Baten Kaitos, and while it's not a flawless interactive experience (its aforementioned basic Empire plot; some dodgy voice acting), it's so far given me the opportunity to explore a castle made of luminescent clouds, a Hawaii-like jungle kingdom with a cultural predilection for vivid rainbow palettes, and a world of flying islands founded atop a neverending sea of poisonous miasma, whose greatest myth is an unimaginably deep and vast pool of water known as the Ocean that once engulfed their world. I'm not saying that fantasy is flatly superior to an attempt at real-life drama, but I'll happily take a flawed expression of true ambition and imagination over the neverending samey deluge of knockoff dreck to which too many producers are aspiring nowadays.
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David Cage is praised first and foremost for how much his games play like interactive films, but, paradoxically, the more Indigo Prophecy succeeds in its goal of emulating a movie, the more boring it is. It's the same "I've seen this already" problem with the Empire plots, but I think here that it's a problem of concept itself more than execution: the end goal of the recent triple-A push to make games supposedly feel like movies is to make an inferior copy of a product I've experienced a thousand times before. Games aren't going to get better at being movies than movies are, and chasing that goal without embracing at least some of the strengths of the medium is just going to make your work seem as glaringly derivative as it is. The only gamelike interactive things Indigo Prophecy boasts (besides occasional "choose which cliche the droning plot will follow next" minor story branching) are lengthy distractions - play your guitar; put an LP on your turntable; wash your hands. Not a bonus, when the pacing is glacial as it is.
As mentioned, I've been playing Baten Kaitos, and while it's not a flawless interactive experience (its aforementioned basic Empire plot; some dodgy voice acting), it's so far given me the opportunity to explore a castle made of luminescent clouds, a Hawaii-like jungle kingdom with a cultural predilection for vivid rainbow palettes, and a world of flying islands founded atop a neverending sea of poisonous miasma, whose greatest myth is an unimaginably deep and vast pool of water known as the Ocean that once engulfed their world. I'm not saying that fantasy is flatly superior to an attempt at real-life drama, but I'll happily take a flawed expression of true ambition and imagination over the neverending samey deluge of knockoff dreck to which too many producers are aspiring nowadays.
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