Fahrenheit, known as Indigo Prophecy in North America, is a game by Quantic Dream. It is one of their first games in the style that they are later well known for. Despite the fact that it is remastered for modern systems, there are a lot of rough edges, and it is still very clearly a game from the 2000s. Booting up the game and you can immediately see this, with the PlayStation 2 logo popping up, muddy blurry textures, and giant text sizes that are all reminiscent of games from that era. It's basically an upscale of the PS2 version with very little being done to improve it.
Upon starting up the story, it immediately captures your attention with its plot. Lucas Kane is in the toilet at a diner, and we see something disturbing. He seems to be possessed, against his will, and murders a fellow patron. What follows is him trying to cover up and escape. Once the body is found, two detectives, Carla and Tyler, come to investigate this murder and try to track Lucas down. Being able to play as both Lucas, the murderer, and the two policeman Carla and Tyler, who are trying to track down the murderer, gives the story an interesting perspective. Playing both sides, you’d want both sides to succeed and achieve in what they want to do.
Despite the hook, and the story has huge potential, there are some odd writing moments, even early in the game. Lucas keeps getting these weird visions, and the story hints at something supernatural. Although this can be explained away (at first) because of Lucas’ failing mental state, and in fact, that would have been a great direction for the game to go into. The story is broken up into chapters, where it moves from setting to setting, scene to scene, and you control the different characters as the murder investigation unravels.
As it is basically an interactive movie, you wouldn’t expect the gameplay to be amazing. It’s effectively filled with quick time events (QTE), and unfortunately even those are not implemented well, and the controls are frustratingly horrid. The camera controls are terrible and unintuitive, like an early 3D game from the 1990s. It’s basically fixed camera angles that you can cycle through and move it around a little bit. The worst part is that when you’re moving a character, the camera angle will shift, and you lose all sense of direction. Often, you feel like the character isn’t going in the direction you don’t want them to go in and you’re wrestling with the controls.
Next are the QTEs, which make up the bulk of the “action scenes”. Interacting with anything, such as talking to people, opening doors, picking up objects etc requires a short QTE, basically a flick of the analogue stick. The decision to map all the QTEs to the analogue sticks rather than the face button is horrible, as there are times when it doesn’t properly register the direction, you’re flicking the analogue stick in. And when some of them have such tight time limits, then it is very awkward to do it quickly.
The game also doesn’t like to give you much direction in what to do and where to go. You will easily miss things. It wants you to spend time methodically going through everything but that significantly slows down the pace and makes it very boring. Not helped that it loves to drag scenes out longer than they should. On top of that, adding time limits to certain scenes to give you pressure, while not giving you any direction, is an unfair move by the developers. You can retry scenes, but in others, you are limited by lives. The QTEs may be novel and fun at first, but when each one of those keeps dragging on and on and on to extend the length of the game, they quickly outstay their welcome.
The game has annoying gimmicks such as a character being claustrophobic, so you need to mash some buttons to keep her breathing and panic under control. The problem with this is that you are constantly doing this while trying to figure out what you must do in that scene to progress. It’s not fun juggling the two together. The QTEs also don’t feel like they connect properly to what’s happening on screen, they are there just so you aren’t watching a movie. Representing the QTEs as two colored circles is not a great idea either as they aren’t especially intuitive, especially when sometimes they flash by so quickly.
And then there are the forced stealth sections, complete with the universally loved instant fail requirements. The game was not designed for any type of gameplay, let alone stealth. It gives you a poor map and very little ability, so you must blindly use trial and error to get through. It’s frustrating and annoying, and frankly, an extremely poor design. Being forced to repeat sections again and again is horrendous.
The graphics are not great. They are clearly still early PS2 levels with barely any effort made to improve them. Basically, the game just got its resolution increased so that it doesn’t look like a blurry mess in HD, but nothing was done to improve the textures or character models. This, combined with the clunky controls (as that hasn’t changed either), and you have this time relic of a game that will put a lot of people off.
Despite the serious and grounded beginning, the story will take a turn for the fantastic from the midway point. It had so much potential but then the writers just threw whatever could stick. As a result, there are jumps in the story that cause inconsistencies and plot holes. Lucas does impossible things and basically the game uses the same weak excuse to explain all these impossible things, where it feels like a giant coincidence. It is a disappointing direction that the plot eventually goes for, and the reveal the villains felt like it was out of nowhere. It was as if it was too hard to write the ending, so the writers gave up and gave us some fan fiction quality material.
Further denting the quality of the game is how slowly it dragged the beginning out, which wasn’t bad even though there was some pointless filler material. By comparison, the second half felt very rushed as it went from place to place. A few drawn out battles which end up making the final battle, which was extremely short by comparison, severely underwhelming. Despite the many apparent choices and variations, you could take, the different endings are only determined by how well do you in the final battle. The story takes around eight hours to complete, longer if you are lost. You can replay using chapter select to try out different things but there really isn’t much to pull you back.
Overall, Fahrenheit had a lot of potential. It started off so strongly, presenting an engaging mystery that sucks you in. Playing from both the perspective of the murderer as well as the investigator, provided some interesting conflicts of interests whenever you played their section, as you want them both to do well and not do so well. Unfortunately, the plot soon degrades into something that isn’t nearly so thoughtful, with a rushed development and ending that leaves a bitter taste in your mouth.
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The physical release comes with a cardboard sleeve, a message from the developers, and a small artbook.
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