![]() ![]() A number of decisions that I tried wound up directing me to the same destination to push the story along. This is the brick wall that a lot of FMV titles wind up running into: the limits of what the storytellers can produce. And whatever those metrics showed me, it didn't seem to radically alter the outcome of the game. You can check how much a character likes you at any point by hitting (in my case) the PS4's touchpad. ![]() ![]() In one run, I did everything I could to alienate a character, and they were still prepared to sacrifice themselves for me by the end. The story hit the same beats no matter what I did. Depending on how you play it, your friends will become foes and vice versa, or at least that's the plan.įrom my playthroughs, that doesn't seem all that true. Those decisions will apparently affect the outcome of the game, as well as your relationships with each of the main and incidental characters. Like Bandersnatch, the PS4's Until Dawn and its ilk, the game offers you a number of decisions that you'll need to make under time pressure. But the broader backstory, focusing on the not-too-vast conspiracy that prompts the crisis, gets far more attention. After all, with doctors racing to (ostensibly) save a person's life, there's a lot of time spent having video chats about how important it is to get working. You wouldn't call the story muddled, but it does make some interesting choices about how it sets up its tale. Tennant spends a lot of time standing around saying that she wants to save her patient, but never actually does anything that might help. With enemies both inside and outside, can you prevent a pandemic, save a life and get out before the air runs out? Well, the game doesn't really focus on those questions - and the idea of actually doing any medicine is quickly forgotten. But things in your perfect life go awry at the, uh, complex in which you work, and the nanotechnology you're working on gets out.įor reasons I won't go into to avoid spoilers, you're locked in a bunker below the building in a race against time to escape alive. After you learn you can't save everyone, you now work as a nanotechnologist working on a miracle cure to save. Amy Tennant, a doctor who previously helped save lives during a civil war in a fictional Asian nation that probably isn't Myanmar. ![]() You can disable notifications at any time in your settings menu. "After a major bio-weapon attack on London," says the game's blurb, "two scientists find themselves in a locked-down laboratory with time, and air, running out." That's actually a little bit of a misdirect, but I don't know if that was intentional on the part of the studio or an error. An outfit associated with FMV games is Wales Interactive, which previously made Late Shift and The Bunker, and is now behind The Complex. In the gaming world, these games have always bumbled along, catering to a small audience of fans. The interactive movie wasn't Netflix's first attempt at branching video, but it's certainly the highest profile in recent years. These days, no discussion of FMV games can begin without the obligatory mention of Bandersnatch, the Black Mirror special broadcast on Netflix. That game combined FMV, virtual environments and a point-and-click detective game in a way that worked surprisingly well. Sadly, those two Mega-CD titles often drown out discussion of more interesting early PC titles, like 1994's Tex Murphy: Under A Killing Moon. Most histories mention Night Trap and Sewer Shark, both rescued from the failure of the VHS-based Control-Vision by Sega. After all, nobody wants to fixate on doctors in a life-and-death race against disease when there's a pandemic raging, do they?įull-motion video (FMV) games, or interactive movies, have been around ever since the CD enabled PC games to use more than a few floppy discs' worth of data. And it's likely that The Complex, an interactive movie about dangerous biotechnology, skirts the same issue. The pilot episode of X-Files spin-off The Lone Gunmen, which aired six months before 9/11, featured a terrorist plan to fly a plane into the World Trade Center, for instance. There are countless examples of the real world intruding on art, making something that was fine a day ago a grisly mistake now. ![]()
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