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Back in January I played through this game again because I needed to cleanse my pallet after the busy holiday gaming season. The first time I played Indigo Prophecy was in 2007 and I played it on 360 since it's backwards compatible. Even though that was several years ago the game was very memorable and I wanted to go through it again, so last month I did.

Indigo Prophecy is the game that Quantic Dream made before Heavy Rain. It's a cinematic adventure game following a paranormal thriller story of murder, crime investigation, and conspiracy. You will take control of a few different characters throughout the game and see the story from both the fugitive and detective points of view which I always liked. The game isn't really broken into levels, instead the story progresses through episodes and each episode often requires you to experience sequences from the perspective of both the fugitive and detective characters. In an episode you can choose whichever sequence you want to experience first, but eventually you finish them all and the plot will be ready to progress to the next episode. When I play, it feels like I'm binge watching a show on Netflix but in the interactive game sense. An episode comes to an end, there's loose ends, suspense and drama building, and it makes me want to experience the next act.

You walk around in third person, interacting with the environment via the thumbsticks. The controls occasionally get frustrating because your direction of movement is relative to the camera so as you move through an area you need to adjust the thumbstick accordingly because you'll always be walking by, to, or from the camera. The gameplay is paced between exploration and action. Exploration consists of simple interaction with the thumbstick, while the action sequences consist of quick-time thumbstick puzzles and trigger puzzles. I put the difficulty on easy so that I can focus on the dialogue and drama between characters, because the puzzles sometimes occur during dramatic dialogue. The gameplay has its problems but luckily you can turn the difficulty down to breeze through silly sequences since the characters and atmosphere are the actual draw of the game.

But before I explain why the game is good and why it's memorable to me I need to vent about this one action sequence that happens during the game midway through. I need to tell you about it, laugh, and finally move on because it's now February and I'm still shaking my head and thinking about it. So during this particular part of the episode your fugitive character comes home to his apartment where many sequences take place throughout the game. However during this one you come under attack from paranormal forces which try to hurt you by levitating objects and throwing them at you while you do a thumbstick puzzle. Successfully doing the puzzles will make you dodge each single item. What makes it so hilarious is that the game tries to use just about every asset available and it goes on for what feels like 3 minutes or more. If the kitchen has a table and four chairs, you will see all of those things comin' atcha'. Table coming, dodge! Chair 1, dodge! Chair 2, dodge! Chair 3! Chair 4! Land-line phone, dodge! Small box in the corner 1! Small box in the corner 2! Living room chair 1 then 2! Entertainment center remote, go! Those are a few literal examples of items the game used. If it was monotonous and procedural for you just reading that, imagine playing it. Eventually the game uses up the majority of all the assets and the whole apartment falls apart into a supernatural void, who would've known? It kind of makes me warm inside thinking about how silly that was. I do like this game a lot though so let's move on.

The characters and atmosphere are what keep me coming back to the game every couple years. This isn't a masterpiece of writing, but it is different and if you need to cleanse your pallet and get away from super-soldiers, vikings, and steam-punk assassins Indigo Prophecy will definitely give you something different. The story gets really out of this world silly in the last act, but all the stuff leading up to the last act is very entertaining and compelling. You get to make choices throughout each episode that will affect all the various character's mental states. One great example of this mental state system working well is early in the game when you have the choice to save a young boy who has fallen through a patch of lake ice and is in danger of drowning. For context, the fugitive character began the game by murdering somebody, trying to clean it up, and escaping to try and regroup. He felt possessed while it happened, like it wasn't really him, and he spends the rest of the game trying to figure out why.

So back to the scene with the boy falling through the ice, up until that point your fugitive character has been loosing his mind and is wracked with guilt and confusion. If your mental state gets too low your character may kill his/herself, quit, or do something that keeps the story from progressing, which I had happen to me a couple times with different characters. Making the choice to save the boy will bring a large boost to your mental state and make the fugitive feel somewhat human again. I decided to save the boy, and the way Quantic Dream handled the scene made for a beautiful humanizing moment that made me care about the fugitive and have some hope for him.

I felt that was a commendable storytelling moment not only in execution but in placement as well. It came at the perfect time, humanized the emotionally tortured character, and gave the player reason to want to continue the adventure seeing as his story arc itself is centered around him finding answers, justice, and making sure he isn't crazy. Another thing that gives the scene more layers and impact is the fact that a cop notices you save the child, and the cop recognizes you. The cop is the same cop that was in the diner the night you went and killed somebody in the diner's bathroom. The cop believes you may the murderer they're looking for, but he stays back and decides to let you go because of the great bravery and moral compass you showed by saving the child who fell into the ice. Later in the game when you are playing on the detective side of the story, that particular cop talks to your detective character to explain that day at the lake when the child fell through and why he let the fugitive escape.

The system stays fresh throughout the game because sometimes your choices have unintended consequences, sometimes you can try to do a good thing and end up more depressed. People may react to you in ways you didn't anticipate. There are a lot of narrative beats I like in the game, and I like a lot of the options for interaction but the game wouldn't be able sell those emotions and moments without a solid atmosphere. The lighting, environment art, music, and characters all come together to build a unique atmosphere that is cold (literally), introspective, speculative, suspenseful, anxious, and can convey depression, confusion, isolation, loneliness, as well as glimmers of warmth and hope through character interactions. Two locations come to mind as the most memorable. The first being the diner you explore at the beginning of the game, and the second being Detective Carla's apartment.

The diner is a small intimate setting placed at the corner of an intersection in New York on a bitter cold and snowy night. Sitting booths line the wall, opposite the booths is a long service counter full of stools to sit at, the other side of the counter is the humble kitchen where you watch your food be made, and in the back is a bathroom. The diner is never particularly busy, but it gets by, the regulars come in, everybody knows everybody. The people are tight knit, blue collared, but are inclusive and don't give new patrons any trouble. Your tiredness will make your mental state drop so grabbing a cup of coffee is a good idea in this diner. It's here the story starts, a grizzly murder occurs in the bathroom, and the murderer wakes confused and distraught after committing the crime and will stumble figuring out what to do next.

The second memorable location in the game as I mentioned was Detective Carla's apartment. Carla is stressed out, her mind is consumed by the investigation, she expects phone calls any time of the night, yet she tries to unwind while at home to avoid going insane. Warm and soft light fills her apartment, she can change out of her work clothes into pajamas if she likes, she can have some pizza, grab a drink from the fridge, listen to music, check her emails, have some wine, and have an old friend come over so they can catch up. All the while, if her music player is on you can have a this beautiful song called Sandpaper Kisses play in the background. The song is what really sells the atmosphere, I ended up loving this song. I found it on youtube and now I can listen to it outside of the game and enjoy it. Indigo Prophecy has its problems but I keep coming back to it because of the unique characters and the atmosphere it built for me to experience. In another year or two maybe I'll go through it for a third time.