If I had young kids, I’m not sure I would let them play LA Noire and there’s no other game I wouldn’t allow them to play.
It’s not that there’s a lot of violence of sex but there themes are very heavy. It’s not adult because people say “fuck” or because people kill each other with chainsaws. It’s more about being able to understand what’s going on and the emotional impact of the situations.
I’ll say why in the following post so people who move their mouse over the title don’t see spoilers.
Heavy Rain?
There is very little sex involved. The most explicit sex scenes are a man walking into a woman’s place and coming out the next morning and discovering a woman in a man’s bed. There are breasts but they are in a definitely unsexy setting.
The violence is also quite tame. You shoot people as a cop and soldier but the game doesn’t dwell upon it.
But what you have to deal with is more serious than that. At some point, you have to choose between charging a pedophile who has little evidence against him or charging the husband of the victim who has a lot of evidence against him, thereby making the victim’s daughter an orphan.
If I understood correctly, Phelps was glory-seeking in WWII. This caused him to give orders that resulted in civilians being burned to death. The man who obeyed the order became psychopathic as a result and killed other people during the story. In the end, the man was executed.
Phelps gets glory but for something which he knows he doesn’t deserve. He saw his friend get taken apart by artillery, was shellshocked and found the next morning and given a promotion and a medal.
Kelso’s boss has sex with a 12 year old and will apparently not suffer any punishment for it.
There’s a lot of alcoholism and drug abuse. There’s also domestic violence and teens running away. Love triangles and betrayals.
There’s a lot of corruption in the police service and as a cop, you can charge people even though you don’t think they did it. You don’t like commies? Then you don’t feel as guilty charging the commie.
The main scam is convoluted. I’m still not sure I fully understand it.
I must be missing other elements.
It just seems too cognivitely and emotionally heavy for kids.
Planescape: Torment
I mean, I’m not even trying hard and that game is too emotionally involved for kids. It’s like reading a great novel.
There are tons of games that have maturity like that.
I’ve played both Heavy Rain and LA Noire, and I think both are very much adult, mature stories. Never played Torment, so I can’t speak to that. I would certainly keep kids from playing both Heavy Rain and LA Noire because of the themes (and gruesome imagery in several places in both games).
I’d forgotten about Planescape: Torment and fully agree with its nomination.
It doesn’t help that the plot is complicated enough to confuse adults, never mind kids. You start the game as a heavily scarred and tattooed amnesiac, waking up on a slab in a morgue. You’re in one of the “Outer Planes” of the D&D universe, specifically in the city Sigil on the plane Pandemonium. That’s the easy part.
You keep meeting people who say they know you; many of them hate your guts, some of them join up with you. These probably aren’t mutually exclusive - especially since some of the latter people may not recognize you as you are now.
[spoiler]It turns out that you’re essentially immortal, due to a deal you made with an evil demoness-like being. You do die but come back to life as an amnesiac. Your body also doesn’t get rejuvenated either, so you’re really beat up. It doesn’t help that you get a few opportunities to enhance your powers that also require you mutilate some body part to make it work.
You also know some of your companions, it turns out. One who used to be a man but is now just an animated skull - he was the one who lied to you about how you could be immortal, leading to this twisted existence, and is following you out of guilt. You actually have a tattoo on your back that lists some information for you, which this skull reads off for you. He omits the final line, which warns you to not trust him.
Another, a highly religious warrior, was tricked into following you previously by you giving him forged religious texts that buoyed his spirit when he was doubting his faith. He pledged to follow you always as a result, and not knowing you were immortal, it bound him to you forever. You only saved him because you wanted to get hold of his unique, amazingly powerful sword.
A mad mage who follows you used to be your student. You tormented him and tortured him during his studies, believing he had to suffer fire in order to learn it. It drove him insane, and he tried to burn part of the city down.
And there’s the matter of your former lover, who appears to you as a ghost on and off during the game. In life, she had the gift of prophetic visions, and fell in love with you. You used her for her visions and abandoned her to die when it was convenient for you. Even after that, she still loves you, and you still use her visions. Maybe you even still claim to love her, when you don’t remember her at all.
In one “life” you did things like kill people after learning from them, just to prevent others from learning that information as well. The reason you sought immortality in the first place is because you did so many horrible things in your original life, you knew you could never atone for them all and would be punished in the afterlife. Rather than have the opportunity to try to do so - or at least escape terrible things - your other “selves” have in turn been cold and calculating, or insanely paranoid.
You meet incarnations of your former selves and either defeat them or convince them to join into one being. For the final confrontation, your companions may abandon you, fight at your side, or oppose you. That mad mage that you tortured will not like good behavior from you, for instance. Your last foe is your own mortality, which has gained its own sentience and will, and appears as a man. It has been trying to keep you from finding out about it, as it wants its own life to lead, and has been erasing clues that might lead you to the discovery, and tries to “kill” you when you get close to the secret so you’ll be amnesiac again.[/spoiler]
Add to that the concept of how names have power - claim a false name too often (you don’t know what yours is) and you will make flesh a person by that name who takes offense to your claiming to be him, and that the central question of the story is, “What can change the nature of a man?” and you have a story that is both deeply disturbing and philosophical at the same time.
Leisure Suit Larry, anyone?
The Witcher 2 is yet another example of a game with mature elements portrayed in a mature manner.
It’s full of options that aren’t just about the black and white “good/bad” but are mostly ambiguous, often times you’re just choosing from among a set of not so good options.
I think these types of truly adult games have existed for a while on the PC.
I’m tempted to say that they are rare on the console side of things… but I’m not sure that’s entirely true.
That’s exactly the sort of game that gets called “adult” but really means “may contain boobs”. It’s “adult” in the sense that puritanical parents get pissed when their little darlings are exposed to it. It isn’t adult in the sense that cognitive and emotional maturity are required to understand and deal with it.
It has a very immature humor which a child or adolescent would like. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I enjoy lowbrow stuff sometimes. But it’s not beyond the cognitive and emotional reach of children, quite the opposite.
I wouldn’t mind my kid playing that. A 6 year old’s brain and life experiences can handle that kind of game.
I realize that this conception of “adult” may be unorthodox. It would even put Disney’s Bambi in the “adult” category. Remember when we hear the gunshot and Bambi calls for his mother? That’s what I mean when I say “genuinely adult”.
I was just playing Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, which contains a character who was molested as a little girl until she blew out her father’s brains with a shotgun “all over the silly clown wallpaper”. And there’s the club manager who wants you to kill the guy who bankrolled the club because he makes her have sex with him.
I found Red Dead Redemption to be quite adult in theme in places, but yet juvenile elsewhere (the word “cunt” has a place in Westerns but felt very shoehorned into this one). I wouldn’t let my teenage nephew play it, though.
Hit man.
Jump-man?
Pac-man!
PC gamers looking forward to L.A Noire can now rejoice!
It’s been officially announced for PC this fall:
Featuring 3D support and enhanced and customizable graphics and control options.
Now where is my Read Dead, Rockstar?