It wasn’t very long back in gaming history when adventure gaming was at its peak. Point-and-click adventures thrived and people appreciated complex, likeable characters with a story-oriented gameplay with elements of puzzle-solving involved in it. When games like Grim Fandango and The Longest Journey had a faithful fan following behind them. All of that remains nothing but history now. Gaming has evolved and apparently adventure gaming is considered too archaic for “modern-day” gamers today. Hoping to revive this dying genre, Quantic Dream’s David Cage once said, “The genre needs a new perspective”. To deliver upon his words, Cage came up with a sort of new re-imagining the genre needed in the form of Fahrenheit (known as Indigo Prophecy in North America for some strange reason). Calling Fahrenheit “different” would be an understatement. It plays like anything but a conventional game. To start off, it controls differently. Instead of the usual use of analog sticks you would expect in a third-person perspective game, Fahrenheit comes up innovative control design. With tighter controls which aim at making character movements seem realistic rather than exaggerated this game definitely gets the re-imagining part of adventure games on consoles spot-on. But, Quantic Dream doesn’t stop there. Instead they go one step ahead and bring out “intuitive, immersive controls” (as put forward quite humorously by David Cage in the game’s tutorial) which really sets Fahrenheit apart from any game of it’s time. These “intuitive controls” are nothing but a simple but unique refinement of console controls. So if your character wants to open a door, you have to do push the analog stick forward to push the door open. Similarly if you want to pick up a mug, you push the right analog up. Such actions always appear on the top of the screen whenever you approach any such “interactive” objects, so you always have an idea of which direction of analog stick will do what. It’s a smart idea and is implemented pretty well to an extent. The game also uses quick-time events (QTE) in generous (and in latter stages, excessive) amounts to involve you in the action taking place on-screen. Most of the times, QTEs are used in fight sequences taking place on-screen but they’re also used for different slightly irrelevant purposes like playing a guitar, dodging and scoring a basket in a one-on-one basketball match etc. It’s not unique (unlike much of the game) and remains as a bleak contrast to the rest of the game. Fahrenheit’s story is a psychological thriller. It begins with easily one of the most tense, exciting sequences I’ve played in a game. You are Lucas Kane, an average Joe that has apparently been “manipulated” into committing a cold-blooded murder in the restroom of a diner in New York City. The game begins here and you take control of Kane. In a thrilling split-screen set-piece, you’re supposed to clear the crime scene of any evidence before a cop sitting in the diner finishes his coffee and visits the restroom to wash his hands. Everything best about the genre is put to use here. Keen visual observation, quick thinking and strong reflexes of player are put to test here. Miss cleaning out bloodstains off your shirt or hiding the knife and you’ll probably see a Game Over screen in less than two minutes of the game. The game features a pretty likeable cast. Lucas Kane as the grim, depressive, paranoid “victim” of an unknown force is probably the most likeable since you’ll be playing as him for most of the game. Other playable characters include Carla Valenti, a NYPD agent and her sidekick, Tyler Miles. Their camaraderie is the humor relief of the game. There’s also Marcus Kane, Lucas’ estranged brother who is a Catholic priest. All of them are voice-acted in an “okay, good” kind of way you would generally expect from a game. Calling Fahrenheit an “interactive movie” wouldn’t be too wrong to an extent. Much of the game progresses in the form of cutscenes many of which are interactive and all of which are very stylishly shot. David Cage uses the game’s camera like a movie director would. Never shying away from utilizing different angles during conversations nor using split screen sequences during numerous cutscenes. There are gameplay sequences similar to the first mentioned above all of them being as exciting. The game is so ambitious on its style and design that it even uses sepia-textured art design in flashback sequences. The game is definitely heavy on cut-scenes but unlike some other games of its type, Fahrenheit has so many tricks up its sleeves that make most of the scenes interesting enough. Despite all of the mentioned praise-worthy elements, Fahrenheit stumbles at many places. Most of these flaws are concentrated or highlighted repeatedly in the absolutely awful second-half of the game. In fact to be honest, calling Fahrenheit’s 2nd half a bleak contrast to the first would be an understatement. For instance, the game relies on quick-time events (QTE) a LOT. They were used restrictively in the 1st half but the game goes overboard with them in later stages. At times, there are three to four long-winded QTEs performed to emerge victorious in a battle. Fail in any one of those QTEs and you’re subject to being tortured with again right from the first QTE. Add to that the annoying use of QTE in things as simple as watching a cutscene. Later in the game, Lucas has the ability to “see the unseen” through his dreams (in other words, parallel universe). However, while you’re seeing his dream via a cutscene you’re subjected to constant QTE that needs to be pressed without fail if you want to watch the cutscene. The problem with this and with every QTE is its core idea. The developers apparently wanted to involve gamers in the action of cutscenes by the use of QTE. The problem with that is that you’re SO busy in pressing controls as displayed by QTE that you actually don’t give a damn about what goes on in the cutscene beyond. You’re just too scared about missing a QTE and starting from all over again. Certain flashback sequences involve you infiltrating an army base. You have to use stealth here. Ironically for a game that uses a variety of camera modes otherwise, these flashback “stealth” sequences have a fixed camera that hinders you from getting any proper view of the surrounding and turns out to be a major annoyance. All of this might have been still acceptable had Fahrenheit’s story not deserted it in the 2nd half. There’s a twist almost midway through the game which turns the story from a psychological thriller into a supernatural Mayan mythology one. After this there’s no looking back. The game ditches logic and sense and brings about every possible cliché and bizarre twist in the book turning a murder mystery into “saving the world”. You’re expected to digest the fact when a realistic, mature story turns into something where “the world is controlled by three clans—Indigo Clan, Orange Clan, Purple Clan”. You’re expected to digest the fact that the protagonist who until sometime was a paranoid, suspiciously psychotic but nonetheless likeable person turns into a superhuman who can blow cars away just by the movement of a finger (and no it doesn’t utilize any of those “intuitive controls” ). You’re expected to also digest that two of the leads who were earlier on opposite paths thinking of each other as enemies, suddenly come across each other, say sorry and have a gimmicky sex scene. If this is how shockingly a great game is going to degrade into a mindlessly numb one, then it is tragic. Characters that you earlier empathized for start taking weird decisions, blurting out dialogues you would have otherwise never expected from this well-written game. This apparently leads to a feeling that the game was rushed in development. The story definitely feels rushed by the end and every bizarre twist the game puts makes you feel that the game did not live upto its potential in the 1st half. Wince-inducing is a polite remark to what I would call 2nd half. Maybe it’s not as bad as I make it sound, but it still remains like a dark shadow of the game’s excellent 1st half. Quantic Dream are a rare breed of developers. They’re highly ambitious and don’t mind taking unconventional steps if needed to achieve that. Their last game, Omnikron : The Nomad Soul was a sci-fi genre masher that wasn’t a particularly good game and not “better than sum of it’s parts” unfortunately. Fahrenheit is definitely better. It will dazzle and amaze you with it’s brilliantly shot and directed cut scenes. It will create a feeling of tension and excitement with the split-screen sequences. It’s story will initially make you wonder upon the sanity of your own character. Yeah, it’s that powerful. But the over-reliance of quick-time events and the pathetic degradation of game’s story into a mindless, clichéd one are easily the two most glaring downfalls of the game. Give Fahrenheit a try but with caution of its possible shortcomings. It’s a shining but flawed example of what adventure genre can potentially achieve.
Moral ambiguity is something which many RPGs over the years have struggled to get a proper grasp on. Treading the thin lines of the so-called "grey area" hasn't been an easy task for many RPGs so it was no wonder that in order to expand their accessibility many RPGs like Fable and Mass Effect began embracing a simplistic good/evil morality system in the recent years. The Witcher thus comes across as a rare creature due to a number of reasons. Firstly it features absolutely no morality system –you are left to judge your own actions on the basis of their consequence. Secondly it is made by a little known Polish developer who developed it on a highly modified 6-year old Aurora engine of BioWare. Most importantly however the Witcher occasionally exudes the rare sort of confidence and ambition that we've rarely ever seen from a European RPG. Based on a series of novels and short stories from popular Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, The Witcher tells the tale of a legendary monster hunter-a Witcher named Geralt of Rivia situated in a dark mature fantasy universe. It isn't dark only in the sense of it's atmosphere. It's dark in nearly EVERY sense –right from the major themes the game tackles to the smallest details of the universe. Sexism,corruption,racism,rape and prostitution and nearly every major evil runs deeply ingrained within every character you'll come across in this game. It is highly refreshing to see a fantasy universe that is built purely for adults and doesn't treat you like a kid even for the slightest moments. Developed on BioWare's Aurora engine, the Witcher is naturally going to be a turn-based affair but CD Projekt, the developer modified it cleverly to make Witcher's combat appear like a highly clever twist between turn-based and action. It can be quick and hectic but it also utilizes the basic turn-based elements from the engine as well. Like most European RPGs, the Witcher's combat is not your everyday clickfest. It requires thought, precision and more importantly timing. Clicking on an enemy initiates an attack. Combos can be built on this attack by timing further clicks at proper time as indicated by a flaming cursor. To add the strategic component to the basic combat, Witcher introduces different stances. There are three different stances – Strong, Fast and Group. Strong does major damage but at very slow speed, Fast does medium damage but unleashes a good flurry of attacks and Group is for delivering minimal damage but to everyone around you. All the stances won't work on all enemies. Like faster enemies will easily dodge your Strong attacks, so the combat does require a great deal of planning and thought even when you're right in the middle of the action. To add another twist to the combat, Geralt uses two swords – Steel and Silver Sword. Steel Sword is effective only on humans whereas Silver is effective only on monsters. This means that in addition to the action combat and the stances, there is thought and planning to be done even when it comes to equipping the proper sword. For instance, before going into a cave full of undead I wouldn't bother applying oils that upgrade my Steel sword since that wouldn't be effective. The Witcher rewards planning and strategy-making in advance and I can hardly recall any RPG in recent times that puts so much emphasis on that and rewards players accordingly. Acting as the two support systems to the melee combat are magic and alchemy –both of which are as unique and unconventional as the rest of the game. Geralt's magic is limited to only 5 spells and these aren't your usual "pure offensive" magic either. These Spells (or Signs as they are called in the game) can be switched in between combat by simple pre-defined hotkeys. Instead of mana, they use up endurance. They are spells that generally aid your melee combat more than anything. These spells knock down, slow down enemies and blocks their attacks for a couple of seconds. As you can see, these aren't offensive spells by any stretch of imagination. The only offensive spell is Igni. Spells and parrying/blocking attacks use up Endurance. To prevent the players from spamming spells to defeat foes like in many of BioWare's games, CD Projekt kept the Endurance bar very limited. Even at an advanced level, using 2-3 Igni spells at once is more than enough to deplete your entire Endurance and it regenerates at a very slow rate. This brings me to Alchemy one of the central components of The Witcher. The lore of the Witchers suggest they are expert alchemists and hence this part of the game gains importance. Alchemy is the chief support system to the game. On normal to higher difficulties it is absolutely necessary to have proper knowledge of alchemical ingredients. Thankfully the game does an excellent job of storing information regarding any potions, its formula, the ingredients required in a rather user-friendly format in the Journal. The Enhanced Edition also introduces a separate section of the Inventory for the alchemical components alone. Geralt can learn the formulae of potions by reading various books available across the Witcher's world. He also needs to learn about how to extract ingredients from a herb or a monster before he extracts it. Potions also can only be prepared by meditating. So if you need a certain potion before a fight, you will need to meditate and mix the potion before it's ready. Potions can last for several hours to a day so preparing in advance is once AGAIN rewarded in this game. Since the Witcher uses a dynamic day/night cycle, meditating can often become useful to skip time until a required point. Meditation can only be done at certain designated fireplaces when there's no monsters around. Meditation also serves as a portal for leveling up your stats. Leveling up in Witcher is rather unique. Instead of traditionally increasing stats, Geralt learns new abilities and in doing so he unlocks higher levels of expertise. The same applies for the Sign/Spells upgrades too. The Witcher's character customization is relatively complex enough to please most RPG fans. Questing is another aspect where the Witcher truly shines. There are often two or more ways to finish a general storyline related quest each leading to a potentially different outcome. Even basic bounty-hunting quests have an added layer of uniqueness surrounding it. If you're tasked to kill three vampires and bring their hearts as a proof just killing three vampires won't do the trick. You'll need to look up in books before hand with the town's booksellers to see if they've got any information regarding how to extract vampire's hearts. The game only hints you in this and there's always little to no hand-holding involved in most of the quests. The game respects its gamers' intelligence and doesn't treat them like a low-IQ idiot. As if it weren't enough already to further demonstrate the talent that these newbie Polish developers have within them, the Witcher has some absolutely fantastic storyline quests that with the added role-playing component strike pure gold. There's a detective quest that runs central through the second chapter and with the game's heavy/moody atmosphere it often resembles a fantasy film-noir of sorts. There is another quest that involves an autopsy of a dead body which can lead to wildly different conclusions all depending upon how smart and observant the player is and how much he has researched regarding the biological abnormalities. There are a couple of more brilliant quests that one doesn't generally come across in RPGs and it's refreshing to see them in one. The game rewards you with a rare degree of satisfaction found in RPGs when you complete such smartly designed quests successfully. The Witcher's story is broken across 5 chapters excluding a Prologue and an Epilogue. It tells the tale of Geralt of Rivia as he travels in search of a mysterious mage who has stolen the Witchers' secrets. A relatively simple premise breaks into something more devious and soon Geralt finds himself caught up to the neck in political skullduggery. Corruption, lies, betrayal are the mere beginning of this rich enjoyable tale. The game doesn't hesitate from presenting player with an array of moral dilemmas none of which fall into the good/evil category of the Fables and Mass Effects. In fact, Witchers' moral dilemmas often don't fall into even Dragon Age's "relatively good and relatively bad" system. Rather in the Witcher, everyone is evil and selfish and it's upto you to judge whose evil is apparently greater. It's often hard to judge none so greater than the end of the Chapter 1 which poses one of the most complex moral dilemmas I've come across in a game. The narration also takes a couple of risks half-way through which pays off in rather surprising ways. Witcher's narration can be hectic when it wants to but it can also slow it down to a calming stroll when it wants to.Breath-taking in both scope and execution, the Witcher's story is one of its key strengths. The world is also highly believable and dynamic. Besides a dynamic day/night and weather cycle, the NPC behavior is something that deserves a mention. When it rains, the NPCs take cover under a roofed passageway or run for shelter. They just don't walk around pretending everything's normal. They also go about their daily chores (not to the same level of sophistication as in Elder Scrolls games) and slowly retire to home or to tavern when night falls. Since this is made on a pre-console BioWare era engine, the player has freedom to kill any NPCs that don't directly break a quest. This can be occasionally useful for getting into areas that you usually aren't allowed into. In that sense, the Witcher is certainly quite open-ended compared to the newer BioWare games. All of this may lead one to believe that Witcher is a perfect RPG in nearly every sense. Unfortunately that is not the case. The Witcher is plagued with problems that it inherits from it's own Euro-RPG genre--namely clunky controls, broken quests and glitches galore. The fact that the Witcher is made on an engine that is almost crumbling under Witcher's modifications doesn't help it's case. Crashes, graphical glitches still exist even in the Enhanced Edition. You'll occasionally run into broken quests just because you didn't reach some point at the proper point in the story. Witchers' multi-act narration kinda escalates the questing issues. Some quests get carried forward to other acts but there's almost no way to finish them since you can't access that particular area you were in the previous chapter. This leads to making your journal look a lot messier and crowded than it should be. Add to this the controls. The Witcher was modified to a massive extent to make it seem like an action game. SEEM like one. Unfortunately Witcher's dodging is clunky and animations often don't match the damage you sustain. All of this is quite simply because Witcher is still a turn-based affair given an action-RPG polish over it. The illusion works for most of the time but when it does break one's frustration is justified. One of the major overhauls in Enhanced Edition is the vast improvement in the Polish to English translation. The original's dialogues sometimes made little to no sense and this lead to a decline in the quality of it's rich storyline. It was a disappointing aspect of the original. However CD Projekt decided to do something about that and retranslated and re-recorded over 5000 lines for the Enhanced Edition. Many of these lines are meant for Geralt and one can immediately sense a much clearer sarcasm in the retranslated dialogues. Some of the story and quests also make greater sense than they did in the original. The Witcher is a rare beast in nearly every sense. Exuding a rare degree of confidence and ambition that few of it's fellow Euro-RPGs have shown over the years, it exhibits the developer, CD Projekt's pedigree and understanding of what works in RPGs and what doesn't. Their emphasis on the often-ignored aspects of planning and strategy as well as in introducing a rare form of moral complexity is commendable. Their balancing of magic as a support system rather than a complete destroyer of enemies is another plus point in their favour. They also don't miss the key aspects of RPGs-the storytelling and decision-making and come out with some highly memorable quests. The game stumbles at a lot of places and it does require a bit of patience to overcome it's Euro-RPG inherited rough edges and clunkiness. The Witcher ultimately could have been a lot more if it knew how to iron out it's irregularities and address its shortcomings. It certainly doesn't lack the ambition nor does it lack confidence and for a large part of the game it successfully executes its unique elements into a memorable role-playing game of a high caliber.
