A friend of mine mentioned Indigo Prophecy to me the other day. Somehow the buzz currently stirring around this game hadn't caught up to me, but after watching the trailer, my interest was piqued. You may remember Indigo Prophecy's developers, Quantic Dream, for their similarly ambitious game Omikron from way back in 1999. At the time, Omikron seemed like the holy grail of immersive cinematic games. It took place in a sprawling dystopic Gibson-inspired futuristic world (I eat that shit up), David Bowie played a key character and wrote several songs for the game including the theme, and it had many unprecedented features that pushed the boundaries of cinematic gaming at the time.

Unfortunately, when I got the game the day it came out, technical glitches and incompatibilities impeded any chance of getting anywhere past the first hour or two of the game. Direct3D drivers just weren't as robust as they are today. My appetite was whetted, but my machine wasn't up to it and I never played Omikron again.

But now there is Indigo Prophecy, a game four years in the making that aspires to take interactive narrative to new heights. I downloaded the PC demo the other night and gave it a shot and I was amazed. The experience that the demo hints at is something that I think a lot of us have wanted to see for a long time. Every choice that your character makes effects the path that the narrative takes... it seems as if Quantic Dream has sucked it up and taken the much-maligned "content explosion" approach to branching narrative, a topic not unfamiliar here at the IMD.

There are a lot of things about Indigo Prophecy that are exciting to me. For one thing, they've come up with an inventive gesture-based control system. On the PC, you move your character around with the arrow keys, but all interactions with the world are done through context sensative mouse gesture that appear along the top of the screen when they are avaliable. The mouse gestures you perform are similar in motion to those of the character on screen, giving the control a novel kind of physicality. Perhaps more importantly, these elegantly simple controls are simple enough for more casual game players to master.

The game oozes with cinematic flair. Wait until you experience the opening from the demo... Quantic Dream has done their homework. On top of inventive game cinematography, Angelo Badalamenti, best known for his scores in the films of David Lynch, has composed an original soundtrack. The motion capture and voice acting are top notch. Its the game Hollywood wishes it could make, but its being made in France!

Its worth mentioning that the game was originally titled "Fahrenheit", but the American publishing company thought it would be difficult to sell a game by that title because of possible associations with Fahrenheit 9/11 so the American release of the game has been re-titled "Indigo Prophecy". But the original title is not all that American gamers will be missing out on. Some mature content, including nudity and an interactive sex scene, was removed in an effort to ensure an "M - Mature" rating. With the Hot Coffee scandal on everyone's mind, Quantic Dream has said that all the code and content deemed inappropriate will be removed for the American version to ensure no naughty modders pull another Hot Coffee. Imports anyone?

Anyway, I urge you to download the demo and see for yourself what is bound to be one of the sleeper hits of the Fall. Its out on September 20th.

Quantic Dream
Official Indigo Prophecy site
The Indigo Prophecy demo

See my brief review from when I saw it at E3:
http://interactive.usc.edu/members/kellee/archives/004441.html

hmm... so you thought the controls were awkward? did you play it on a console or on PC?

The "arcade" machine I played it on at E3 only had a Playstation controller, and all of the action was controlled thru movement of the analog sticks. It was mostly a matter of timing, similar to the Die Hard Arcade game, when you had to react quickly in a moment of danger. The experience was quite unique, I will post again once I give the PC demo a try.

I got to talk to one of the developers for this at E3. The most exciting thing was that these guys are excited about interactive narrative. With so few game developers focusing on this, it was quite encouraging to see one that's forging ahead on this front.

I echo Michael's sentiments above. As far as the controls, Mihai already pointed out the arcade set up used a PS2 controller. What was frustrating to me was that the actions you made revolved around interacting with objects and a)you couldn't interact with every object, you could only interact with ones they wanted you to, b)you had to be in a very specific spot TO interact with an object, so sometimes I thought I couldn't pick it up when I could, and c)I was doing this with a time crunch (the policeman was headed back to the bathroom I was in and I had to clean up the evidence of my crime).
All those factors above resulted in a VERY clunky experience, but like Mike said, the narrative is really interesting, so all of it could be looked over by a serious gamer; however, casual gamers might get frustrated quickly if the designers didn't tune these variables.