Most crappy games reveal themselves as such pretty much from the get go, or at least fairly early on. Not so Indigo Prophecy, aka Fahrenheit.
This is a game that is positively brilliant for about the first 2/3rd and then falls apart so badly at the end I was honestly depressed at how much potential was flushed down the drain.
For those who’ve never heard of it, it’s an adventure game that is the kind of thing the Gabriel Knight series should have become if it had continued. You play a guy who in the very first scene goes into a trance and kills a random man in a grubby diner’s bathroom. The rest of the game is him figuring out what is going on and why he killed that guy. In a really neat twist you also play the two police assigned to track him down, so through most of the game you’re playing a neat game of cat and mouse and staying one step ahead of… yourself.
The whole story is like a neat mix of a police procedural, a supernatural thriller, and even romance, as two of the characters have girlfriends that while not part of the main plot add a lot of flavour along the way.
Anyway, like I said the game is positively brilliant for about 2/3rds, when, I don’t know, they must have run out of funding or fired the writer or SOMETHING because…
[spoiler]The whole thing just goes to shit! First of all you as the main character are given the illusion of having the chance to save your girlfriend (she dies no matter what), but then
- she’s conveniently forgotten
- one of the detectives is literally written out of the game, for no good reason
- the OTHER detective, whom you have been playing as and trying to catch the main character throughout the whole game falls madly in love with him for no other reason than she’s a chick and he’s a dude. I don’t think I can stress how stupid this is. It’s like if Yoda fell in love and had it off with Princess Leia.
- the main character is revealed to have become a zombie (or revenant, if you prefer) after he died trying to save his gf, yet still manages to impregnate the female detective
- the mystery of why he killed the guy in the beginning is revealed to be a hokey prophecy type thing involving ancient Mayan cults and sentient AI
- the main character turns into, basically, a Neo ripoff, all of a sudden able to defy gravity and have big martial arts fights with the baddies
- the Indigo Prophecy involves nothing other than an actual Indigo Child, like those whackjobs need any kind of encouragement at all!
- it’s revealed that the illusion of affecting the plot is just that. In the end the three endings are, the mayans win, the AI win, or the humans win. Pretty much nothing you did along the way matters in this, it’s all decided at the end.
- the game devolves from an adventure game into a really crappy stealth sequence and a series of dance dance revolution like minigames.
[/spoiler]
As an adventure game it lives and dies on its story and atmosphere and I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a drop off in quality in such an easy to place spot in any entertainment medium, ever. It’s like if 2/3rds of the way through Citizen Kane it turned into a musical extravaganza.
