Indigo Prophecy is another step towards the convergence of movies and video games. At the same time, however, it tips its hat to the adventure games of the nineties, but instead of carbon copying them, it takes the genre in new and innovative directions. By combining many different elements from multiple genres,
Indigo Prophecy delivers the interactive cinematic experience that many games have tried, and failed, to do in the past.
Indigo Prophecy’s story is a bizarre blend of murder, cults, Mayan rituals, and otherworldly organizations that control our lives. As Lucas Kane, you begin the game in a bathroom and watch yourself, as if possessed, murder a total stranger. From there, the story never slows. Lucas is constantly haunted by visions of the future, and starts to develop superhuman skills with which he fends off all manner of foe.
The player’s ability to interact with the story is what makes Indigo Prophecy such a thrill to play. For instance, after you murder the man in the bathroom, you can decide to try to cover up the grisly scene. On the other hand, if you are feeling hysterical, you can bolt out of the bathroom, past the cop sitting at a table, and into the night to try to get home as quickly as possible. Throughout the game, you are given choices like these to make, and at first it seems like they will have a huge impact on what transpires down the road. Unfortunately, there isn’t any decision that you can make that will send the main story line off on a tangent. Events can happen quite differently due to your decisions, but the linear progression of the main story must always be followed. The system by which you can affect the course of the game is by no means a perfect one, but it is a step in the right direction that hopefully many games will follow.
Your interaction with characters is also capable of branching, but again doesn’t send the kind of ripples down the storyline that you would like. Indigo Prophecy deals with dialogue a bit differently than other games do. Instead of being able to exhaust an entire dialogue tree, you are given a very limited amount of time to pick a topic to talk about, and you can never go back if you don’t like what you hear. This makes dialogue much more interesting, but it also allows you to miss some parts of the storyline, which can lead to confusing situations down the road when people start talking about a subject that you never got the chance to hear about.
Another interesting twist that Indigo Prophecy throws at you is your ability to play as the two police officers chasing Lucas throughout the course of the game. This dynamic makes for some interesting situations, as there will be times when you spend all your effort covering Lucas’ tracks only to have to undo that effort by playing as the police.
