Reviews by Shazaam

Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered
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Forgive the graphics

When this game first came out, there was little to nothing like it.

If you like games like "The Walking Dead," "The Wolf Among Us," and anything else that Tell Tale Games has been putting out lately (among others), this game is up your alley.

This is the first interactive movie game I played and it is the game that made me fall in love with the genre. The developers went on from this experement to bring two games to the PS3: "Heavy Rain," and "Beyond: Two Souls." While I really enjoy all the games Tell Tale puts out, "Indigo Prophecy," "Heavy Rain," and "Beyond" set a very high bar that even Tell Tale, with their excelent work, has not yet lived up to.

While this game's graphics are well below the standards of today's gaming, the story and the way the game plays makes this game definitely worth a try. It combines the old adventure game quality of moving around an environment and looking at things, picking things up at times and doing something with them, with a silly "Simon" interface, which, I admit is, not the greatest, but as I said, this feels a lot like an experiment.

It feels like an experiment in the same way that "Jurrasic Park: The Game" feels like an experiment for Tell Tale Games.

However, there is a sort of control over the story in "Indigo Prophecy" where the story plays out differently depending on how long it takes you to react in a situation. Consider the above screenshot of the body on the floor on the left and cop at a counter on the right. This scene happens at the beginning of the game, and depending on how you react, either the cop will catch you in the bathroom with the body or he won't, and then he'll either pursue you into the streets or he won't.

This might seem minor in comparison to other choice-based games out there now-a-days, but it makes me happy to feel like I'm not constrained by the set rules of the game, like my actions as the character I'm pretending to be have some relevance.

If you're into the interactive movie genre, as it is slowly growing in the womb of the Tell Tale Games studio, forgive the graphics and, should your budget allow it, give this game a try.

by Shazaam, Canada - Feb 23rd 2015

Master Reboot
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Be cautious...

My MacBook Pro, while old, can still withstand the needs of this game, yet it runs choppy at times, so if you have an older computer I recommend dropping the graphic levels.

I like this game, for what they've created, a visually interesting story world. However, what I have to admit is that I felt compelled on many occasions to just stop playing. But, I invested my money, and so I had to get my money's worth. Okay. What that entailed, then, is a singular play-through. I decided early on that, if I were to stop playing the game, it was unlikely that I would pick it up again.

However, in my attempts to finish the game in one sitting, I must have triggered a bug of some kind. The game, once you get through the intro levels, sets you up in a hub world with 11 doors linked to memories. Okay. Easy enough. It opens 4 memories for you, you can play that in any order, which I like - you're not forced into a specifically linear story. After the first 4 it unlocks another 4 memories. Cool. So I did the first of these four, choosing the first in the row (as they are given to you in such a way as choose 1, 2, 3, or 4, and I chose 1). After which I looked at my options, and continued on with me numerically ascending choice, being the "next" door.

What happened at the end of that memory is simply poor programming, or so I have to assume, and I am somewhat hoping for a patch. At the completion of the "Beach" memory, I had the game reset to the point where I had just entered the hub, meaning I would need to redo all the first 4 memories to get back to where I was. When I tested this theory, by doing the shortest, easiest, and most tedious of the first 4 (the "street" memory), the end resulted in the exact same thing, a reset to the beginning of the hub.

Out of frustration, I left the game to the menu, as I had done earlier often to get my graphic settings to a happy place, only, as earlier I had been presented with a "continue" option, now I had only the option to start a new game. My progress had apparently been lost. So I quit the game. This took forever, and I eventually force quit the program (again, old MacBook, potentially the problem here).

At this point, I haven't tried running the game again, and I don't know if I will.

While the story is compelling and the game relatively interesting as a whole, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

It's billed as a horror. It's not a horror. Things jump out at rare times. A creepy girl with glowing eyes lurks around. Maybe, if the game doesn't go screwy on you, you can get to the "Circus" level, as the video trailer depicts briefly, and maybe then they use clowns in a frightening way, but other than that possibility, the game is not a horror.

The Mac Game Store's Pros:

Gorgeous visual style: I won't argue completely. They could have done better, but I think they must have done pretty good with what they had, and I cannot fault them here. The main problem is the word "gorgeous." If you are willing to give the game a chance, give it a chance for the story, not the graphics.

Intriguing story-line: I whole-heartedly agree, though the game play doesn't draw me in enough to warrant more than one session to play-out the entire storyline.

34 Explorable environments: No argument, however some are very small, not very interesting, and all you're required to do is grab a glowing cube. There may be something to look at as well, but nothing significant. Some of the levels are quite interesting, like the childhood level where you are small in a child's playroom, but its all dark and menacing (still not horror enough. No sense of dread or a feeling of being hunted or anything to make it other than a dark room. The sound effects do help a little, and I give them that, but not beyond the quality of "creepy").

Dynamic atmospheric soundtrack: Well, I just mentioned the sound effects briefly, but I didn't say anything about the footsteps (or foley, for those in the know, not that I am). The footsteps leave me wanting just a little more, but not to be discouraged by. The music is ambient and appropriate, so I am willing to give the person describing the game to us credit for this one truth.

Supports the Welsh Language: I didn't test this, so let's give that guy credit for a second truth.

I give the game 3 stars, despite my failings at fully enjoying the game, because I want to give the creators credit for having done something creative, interesting, and, at times, fun. The story is really the drawing factor, which you get in bits and pieces through rubber duckies (yes, you heard me correctly, and no it's not ridiculous enough) and through animated (i.e., cartoony) story fragments at the end of each memory segment. Despite the minimalist approach to the story, I began to get really quite intrigued the further I got and, sadly, most of all at the point where the game went awry.

Be cautious.

Buy it if you must, but be very very careful about whether you really want to spend the money. If you do, you're basically giving the money away for free, and, while I have found peace with that in my support of a growing developer and people who put obvious effort into a game that I can't bring myself to play again, you might not be so happy with you're expenditure.

by Shazaam, Canada - Feb 23rd 2015

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