TITLE: Fahrenheit
DEVELOPER: Quantic Dream
PUBLISHER: Atari
GENRE: Adventure - Horror/Thriller
LOCALIZATION: Italian
PLATFORM: PC - Playstation 2
We are inside a diner, in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet, with our arms bleeding and a knife in our hands: we do not understand what is happening to us, it almost seems as if we are living in a kind of self-induced trance - it looks like a dream, we see a man with a hood, many lit candles and a completely dark room. At some point we get up, open the bathroom door and head for the mirror with slow, copious steps, stagger in, raise the bloody knife in the air and deliver a sharp, decisive blow toward the person in front of us - an elderly gentleman who notices us only at the last moment: one blow, two, three and his severed arteries let the man's life escape...then we wake up suddenly, just like from a bad dream - oh my God, what have we done? We have stabbed a stranger, we have taken a life...we are murderers.
Here is the highly cinematic prologue to one of the most talked-about titles of the last period.
Fahrenheit is the latest creation of David Cage, one of the brightest people in the world when it comes to the world of videogames: his and Quantic Dream's (the production company) beautiful Omikron, a third-person game peculiar enough to merit excellent opinions from both the trade press and the videogame world. But this new product aims for other levels of fun and interaction.
Fahrenheit is a kind of third-person graphic adventure, but the term fits it pretty tightly, especially after the first few game sessions, you can tell right away that we are dealing with a kind of interactive movie, much like Dragons Lair's arcade coin-up a few years ago.
So have the guys at Quantic Dream created a movie and tried to put it inside a videogame container? The question could be answered in the negative but only in part: in truth we are faced with a title that mixes all the features of a movie but also has all the makings of a kind of graphic adventure.
What is immediately striking is the visualization of the game scene, but it would be more correct to talk about the scenes: in fact, the monitor, several times during the adventure, will be split into several parts and several different viewing angles - the same technique used in the Hulk movie. An example? In the prologue scene, while we will be busy erasing the evidence of our murder, the camera will also frame the policeman sitting inside the diner, follow him on his way to the bathroom and take a nice close-up when, the latter, he discovers the lifeless man's corpse: simultaneously, the game will follow ourselves and our actions - we get to have even four scenes simultaneously on screen - simply spectacular.
The interactive movie features certainly do not end there, first of all we will be able to control four different characters: the murderer (ourselves - Lucas Kane), the two policemen investigating the murder (Carla and Tyler) and the murderer's brother, a priest (Father Markus Kane). At the beginning of each game chapter, we will be able to choose who to impersonate, usually the choices are divided among three characters at a time but the real peculiarity of the title lies in the fact that, as it happens in the prologue, after Lucas Kane escapes from the scene of the crime, we will be ourselves, with the two police officers investigating directly at the crime scene: this will lead us to discover any details and evidence to frame the murderer - we will therefore have to search for the murder weapon and as much information as possible to frame the culprit. The idea of being hunter and prey makes the title even more interesting and innovative, at least in its genre.
Then we have the particular control system that between consoles and PC changes relatively little, while in the Playstation we need the analog levers, in the computer, we will use the directional arrows, the numeric keyboard and the mouse but the dynamics remains basically the same: within the game, there will be some sections (mainly fights and skill scenes or stealth passages) where combinations to press will appear on the screen and if we have the right reflexes, we will gain for the better or for the worse...if, for example, we are attending a fight, determining the right key combination, we will not go and lose a single life (five in all) but if we fail in the trials, we will lose lives until our untimely death or our arrest by the police. In short, gameplay you don't see every day!!!
This particular game system amazes in the first few hours and then becomes rather monotonous and simple.Another thing worth noting is the fact that during the action scenes, we will be so strained to follow our own finger movements that we will often risk missing the beautiful sequences we will have on the screen, precisely because we will have to give more attention in the buttons to be pressed at the same time.
But story, graphics and music? Let me clarify the first and most important point right away: the story of the title is very well structured as far as the thriller and barely bordering on horror sections are concerned, with excellent twists and turns and great settings and game situations. The real weakness of the title occurs towards the end, when the banality takes over and everything becomes a kind of soup of genres by also touching on topics such as science-fiction (aliens) or fantasy-without revealing anything about the plot, just know that the Matrix continues to make people talk about it. Thus, the story has its own charm but also has the misfortune of going on topics covered ad nauseam by cinema and literature (more or less recent). Full weakness also regarding the puzzles, simple and too intuitive, I would have liked something more difficult.
Nothing to say about the music and sound effects, on the other hand, all the tracks perfectly accompany every moment of the game, managing to give even more than necessary.
On the graphics, however...let's say that the packaged product suffers too much from both age (it was 4 years in the making) and the ever-present curse between console and PC: a console lover will not find major flaws but a PC user would expect much more on the (almost absent) setting options of the graphics card that allows much more remarkable performance than any gaming box. The characters consist of few polygons and textures that are often too poorly defined, as if Quantic Dream wanted to give an impression of stylization of the final product without achieving an excellent level.
This is really a pity, also because as far as animations and facial expressions are concerned, the game gives full satisfaction - in Fahrenheit we find perhaps the best MoCap (motion capture) present in a videogame of the latest generation. Another thing that disappoints a lot is the interaction factor, in development, they promised seas and mountains but ultimately, it is true that the adventure gives us a lot of freedom in indoor environments but in outdoor environments, we can relatively do little or nothing and follow the usual and annoying invisible corridor to continue in the story.
Bottom Line. The two ratings you have already seen, personally take it in these terms: if you are demanding people even from the graphical point of view (lacking in this title), the rating does not exceed 70/100 - if, on the other hand, you appreciate a game even without drooling all the time behind the monitor but prefer to be amazed by story and plot twists, Fahrenheit comes abundantly even in position 80 but not more.
PC system configuration:
- Pentium 3 or higher
- 256 MB of Ram
- 2.5 GB disk space
- 64 MB Video Card
- DVD Player
Reviewed by Fabiano Zaino
