Yesterday I decided to slowly tackle my narrative game backlog.
I grabbed my Steam Deck and played through Late Shift.
According to the Steam Store:
Late Shift is a high stakes FMV crime thriller. Forced into a brutal London heist, your choices matter in this interactive cinematic experience with adaptable storylines that lead to one of seven conclusions. Your decisions are you.
I'm afraid to say that this is one case of marketing being better than the actual thing.
This game suffers from almost all the problems I complain about on this list:
It's video-based, so it takes time to go through dialog and scenes. You'd expect that, at least after the first playthrough, you'd be able to skip scenes. Nope. You are forced to re-watch every single video.
Come on Wales Interactive, Lucas Arts identified this in the 90s and gave us F4, this is not acceptable now (yes, the game is from 2017, but 2017 > 1990).
So, this makes the game impractical to replay.
But well.. I may accept that if the game's very well crafted.
As it turns out, most of the choices are cosmetic. I'm wondering if this is by design, given that the description says:
Forced into a brutal London heist
Forced being the keyword here.
The options they give you in one way or another always lead you to the same place.
When you do a play-through with diametrically opposed choices, you end up pretty much in the same place.
One would think that at least it has an influence on changing one or two story beats, but no, there's no way.
Again, Forced is the keyword.
In addition to this, the writing has problems.
For example, there are moments where you hear the inner voice of the character. And it's so obvious that the designer wants to tell us what to think that it breaks the suspension of disbelief.
It's a bit sad because it's clear that a lot of effort was put into this game.
Something I do want to highlight that felt very good:
FMV games usually have player choices inserted at the end of a scene, where the flow of the game stops, you choose, and it continues.
Late Shift puts the options with a timer during the scene process, and it doesn't feel as clunky.
For this type of game, it's a good design decision.
In fact, if you don't choose anything, the game plays the canonical version of the story. I liked that.
Unfortunately, it's a design decision that is less important than everything I mentioned before.
If you played Late Shift, do you have a different opinion? Can you think of other games that suffer from similar issues?
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