Farenheit – Indigo Prophecy to those Stateside – has an amazing first hour or two. You start as a guy who stabs someone to death in a restaurant bathroom while in some sort of trance. After snapping out of it you realise what’s happened and furiously try to clear any evidence and get out before being caught. Later you control detectives trying to find clues that you left behind and this cycle of escaping and trying to catch yourself continues for an hour or three; and it’s brilliant – utterly brilliant. Classic even. Then, suddenly, Farenheit turns steeply downwards; flying through bad writing and horrible game mechanics into almost chaos and completely bat-shit-crazy plot. It goes on to do just about everything wrong that it possibly can and I illustrate how it made me feel in graph form:
It fucks up everything. From a fantastic opening of what seems to be a psychological thriller, before the end it descends into as many gaming/story no-no’s as it can fit in.
THE FARENHEIT CLICHE TICK LIST
- An Ancient Tribe – CHECK!
Indeed, this time it’s the Pesky Mayans, but you might as well read that as Aztecs and it’s always fucking Aztecs. Lo and behold they are still around today doing their standard ‘human sacrifices’.
- A Prophecy Involving a Small Child – CHECK!
Bad people want to get hold of a small innocent child so they can rule the world using her ultimate power. Oh and she doesn’t say anything – that old corker.
- Kidnapping at an abandoned Funfair – CHECK!
I’m not even joking. You have to go to an abandoned funfair and ride a rollercoaster to rescue your girlfriend. How the cart stops at the top and lets you out is never explained. Nor is why anyone thought that this was a good idea.
- Aliens – NO!
Phew. Not that old cliche. It’s just adding an external entity that’s allowed to get away with anything because people are unfamiliar with it. I hate things that fall back on this lazy shit of ‘Aliens’ or anything similar that’s not human but can think; like Ai gone bad.
- AI gone bad – CHECK!
FUUUUU!
And even when it isn’t hitting cliches it’s just being generally shit, whether it be in how you interact with it or what’s going on.
THE FARENHEIT BEING A BAD GAME LIST
- Matrix Fight
Later in the game, the mentally troubled killer suddenly gets superpowers. Then he gets into a fight with a superpowered ancient – at which point both take to the skies and fight mid air. This is the point where Farenheit hit 0 on that graph.
- Stealth Sections
You remember those stealth sections we banned ages ago? You know, the ones with fudged AI and logic shoved into an engine that couldn’t and shouldn’t handle it? Yeah, those. There are two hatefully long and unnecessary ones in here.
- Quick Time Events
A lot of how you interact with Farenheit is fine – it’s based on mouse gestures and standard key presses. Then there are the quick time events in their hundreds. They use a system that fills the screen and constantly require input – leaving you unable to focus on the action at all. I hated every single instance.
- Sexual Relations
Towards the end the killer you play as is dead but reanimated and the female detective is helping him resolve everything – fully aware of the fact. Then, because he’s obviously totally irresistible, she tells him she loves him and they have sex. No lead up to it, no romance hinted at in the slightest. It just happens. Because that makes it grown up, right?
Farenheit is utter trite with sprinkles of brilliance. The opening is splendid and after that there are injections of inspiration, but it’s definitely a downhill climb – an unforgivable one. And that frustrates me because it could have been so much more. I think the lead designer fell down some stairs mid-production; that’s the only explanation I can give.
There’s some other atrocious game design. When questioned in your office by Tyler, if you PASS the qte events with the bugs your mood drops so low you lose. What you’re not told is that for those sequences, despite the many many qte’s requiring you to pass up till then, for that one you’re meant to FAIL. Bad bad design.
I’m trying to put my finger on exactly where the game became awful.
Use the graph if it helps.
I too hated the matrix superfight bit, despite loving the moment Lucas first realises his powers and leaps over a train to escape the police.
Actually, this is something I’ve mentioned before, but there’s a moment in Fahrenheit where it just missed the chance to be truly great. When you’re playing as the cops (incidentally, I love the switch between cops and killer in the early stages) and you burst into Lucas’ apartment. At that moment you find, instead of the swish bachelor pad you’ve been playing in, a twisted murder den full of insane scrawls. At that moment I briefly thought “My God, what if it’s always been like this and he’s too crazy to tell?” Sadly that didn’t turn out to be true, and the game peaked about there, it’s a real shame they didn’t go that way.
I still love Fahrenheit though, because it is so daringly different in places, it’s full of lovely scenes that exist only to build character, and the cops/killer split gameplay is great. I have a lot of hope for Heavy Rain, which seems to be trying to fix Fahrenheit’s mistakes, here’s hoping it doesn’t remain a PS3 exclusive.
Craig, I did warn you: Stop once it gets bad and invent your own ending.
I thought it was an amazing game, and very well told but it became a pile of crap near the end. As the graph states.
Yeah, that sex scene towards the end…
Characters have remarked before that he is icy cold to the touch. Also he doesn’t have a cloud breath in front of him when he speaks outdoors.
So she is having sex with a cold walking corpse (who manages to get it up without having a pulse)… in an abandoned train carriage, in a cold, damp cave! She must have some very odd fetichises that lady, to find that situation a turn on.
Fahrenheit was originally planned as a trilogy, I heard, but that idea was axed and they ended up having to cram everything into one game.
The trilogy would evidently have followed the Matrix’s brilliant > okay > shite progression, but at least we’d have had that first instalment as a discrete package.
The effect of the two-sided setup at the beginning of Fahrenheit was unusual and interesting; I think it’s a shame that other games haven’t really followed up the idea.
By forcing you to play against yourself from the first scenario, it encourages you take part by actually role-playing the characters, pushing you out of the comfortable rut of Normal Gaming Behaviour (grabbing every object, reloading, doing each bit as skilfully as possible to gain an advantage).
It’s hard to reconcile this material, both fun to play and structurally ground-breaking, with the random broken nonsense-narrative and QTE-heavy gameplay that comes later. The creepy-as-hell non-optional corpse-sex is doubly a betrayal when you’ve invested in those characters by role-playing them through the game and you know they Just Wouldn’t Do That!
I might be some kind of visionary, because my first hint at the general clusterfuckery of the game came quite early, right in the bathroom murder scene: When I saw the flash that clearly stated that my character was being possessed by some dude in a rob, I though: “Oh, so *that* is it, then”, and I had the first low peak in my graph.
Of course, then it got a little better, but then it got worse than anything I could’ve imagined. There was not *one* thing about the AI that wasn’t seven kinds of wrong. And the secret war between color-themed clans made me think of disgruntled Teletubbies, each one out to take on the world for themselves.