Now who the hell would have thought that people could still release an FMV game in 2019? I know that it’s 2020 right now, but the game was just in the Playstation Plus games so I had to give it a go. I haven’t played one of these games since Double Switch, Fahrenheit, and Wirehead on the Sega CD. And if those were the last games you had to pull from, you could imagine just how excited I was to play this game.
All kidding aside, I was shocked at the production value for this game. The filmic quality of the production didn’t make it seem like a cheap product. If anything, it drew me into the story because of the quality of lighting and acting present on screen. I only recognized one of the actors, which was Terence Maynard. The main character of Erica, played by Holly Earl, was spot on for the role of the player character. While she made certain choices on her own, it’s up to the player to make the more decisive decisions in the story.
Oh, I played the game using the PS4 Erica app that the game recommended when first launching, it worked quite well and I would recommend it.
When first starting it up, I quickly felt like I don’t want to be “playing” this game. I had an urge to just do a half hour, do something more exciting, and come back to it another day. I’m glad that I just stuck with it and finished the 90 minute game in one sitting though. It feels like that’s how this game is supposed to be experienced.
One thing that I really did like about the game is the way interacting with objects in the environment were portrayed on screen. You select the object, the camera moves to a locked in close-up of the object, and then you swipe the screen while a stop motion animation of the opening is displayed, with the speed of the swipe tied to the opening animation. It’s just a nice bit of technology and ingenuity on the creators part that I could appreciate.
I’m not going to spoil anything about the story, since that would be a really dumb thing to do, it’s basically all this game has going for it. The big question is, did I like the story? I mean, there was enough to get me through the game. As things picked up I wanted to see where this whole plot was going and how it was going to resolve itself. The last bit of the story is where I think they stumbled the most. I’ll say this, I just didn’t get enough of a resolution with the ending. It didn’t feel satisfying at all. It ended and I looked over at my boo, who watched the game with me, and we were a bit like “Is that it?”. They needed to have hit that ending story a lot harder, make an impact and leave me speechless, breathless, intrigued or something.
The ending I got, along with knowing there are six different ones in total, made me immediately look up all the other endings to see how different they were from what I had. That was another disappointment, seeing how similar they all are. I guess I was looking for completely different paths as it got towards the end of the game, instead of a large tree with large forks in the branches, it was just a little spruce tree.
Final Score – 7.0
Never would have thought I’d be playing an FMV game, especially one that looked this good. Get it for cheap and give it a try. While not the best story, I do think that I’ll remember my experience playing this game for years to come. At least now I’ll be on the lookout for another good FMV game, which sounds insane.
Ghost Ba Bomb 