Fahrenheit (computer game)

Fahrenheit is a computer game released in 2005 for Windows , Xbox and PlayStation 2 . In the United States, it was released under the title Indigo Prophecy to avoid confusion with the film Fahrenheit 9/11 . It is assigned to the genre of adventure games and is also referred to as an interactive film .

action

The bank clerk Lucas Kane wakes up from a kind of trance in a restaurant toilet and sees a corpse with stab wounds in front of him. The bloody knife in his hand and the incised symbols in his forearms make it clear to him that he must have killed this man. Lucas escapes from the restaurant.

A little later, the police officers Carla and Tyler take over the investigation into the murder case. Meanwhile, Lucas confides in his brother Marcus, who advises him to face the police. Lucas, however, first wants to find out what is behind the mysterious trance. Meanwhile he has terrifying visions of the murdered victim and of the monsters chasing him. As Lucas fears losing his mind, temperatures around the world are falling rapidly. Carla and Tyler are making rapid progress with their investigations thanks to the amount of evidence and evidence in the restaurant. Carla receives a mysterious email in which an unknown sender points out a certain "Kirsten". In the police files, she finds a case that bears this name and occurred in the 1990s. She interrogates the policeman who was in charge of the investigation at the time and finds out that something similar was going on at the time: a man scratched symbols on his forearms and immediately killed a person. He then allowed himself to be arrested without resistance. Meanwhile, Lucas has problems with his ex-girlfriend Tiffany, who recently moved out of his home. In his dreams he also sees a little girl who, it seems, asks him for help. He seeks help from a blind fortune teller named Agatha, who invades his subconscious with him. There they find out that a hooded man in the restaurant took mental control of Lucas and let him carry out the murder. Luca's visions are becoming more and more real and dangerous, and the hooded man from the restaurant now appears in them. A short time later, Lucas finds Agatha dead in her apartment.

In the meantime, Carla and Tyler can unmask Lucas as the perpetrator. They put him on the street when Lucas suddenly shows supernatural abilities: He switches off all police officers, hangs on a flying helicopter, jumps over a train and thus escapes. He wakes up in a church to see Agatha, believed dead, who tells him about an ancient Mayan civilization. He visits a professor who is a specialist in Mayan culture and finds out that he has become the victim of an ancient ritual that repeatedly turns innocent people into murderers. The ritual is performed by a so-called oracle, behind which a clan stands who want to take over the world in this way. Carla also discovers the secret when she questions Janos in an insane asylum, the murderer in the case of Kirsten, who also tells her about the clans.

The Oracle soon sees a threat in the man, given Lucas' amazing skills. Lucas finds out that the oracle needs the girl from his dreams in order to achieve world domination. Lucas can pull Carla to his side and save the girl from the oracle. In addition, a second clan is revealed that strives for omniscience and also needs the girl for this. A showdown takes place in an abandoned military base. Lucas and Carla can defeat both oracles, Lucas takes the girl to a mysterious artifact, where she confides her knowledge to him. With this knowledge, Lucas lives on as a god-like being, while Carla expects a child from him.

Game principle and technology

The game is played with a gamepad , or alternatively with a keyboard and mouse on the PC. Actions are triggered with movements of the right analog stick on the gamepad. Conversations with other characters are also controlled in this way, whereby only a limited amount of time is available to answer, otherwise the game chooses an answer option at random. Every now and then, action sequences appear in which you have to press keys on the keyboard or on the gamepad as quickly as possible and in a certain order, which the program specifies, so-called quick-time events .

The player takes turns taking control of the various pro and antagonists, e.g. B. About the murderer Lucas Kane and the investigating police officers Carla Valenti and Tyler Miles. Supporting roles like Lucas' brother can also be controlled at times. With the help of this change of perspective, the developers achieve an authorial perspective, i. H. The player feels like an objective observer, looks down on the action, but knows about the feelings and thoughts of all the people involved, so he knows all the contexts of the plot holistically, in contrast to the people involved. This emphasizes the cinematic character of the game which, of course, is also reinforced by the third person narration.

The authorial perspective finds its limits in the game at the point at which the knowledge about an act of one person makes the act or the task of the act of another person obsolete. For example, as Lucas Kane you have to hide evidence from the police, which you have to look for in the following as Carla Valenti, one of the two police officers. A book or a film (a medium that is not controlled or influenced by the consumer) could easily describe where Lucas hides the evidence and then how the police are looking for it. In the game, however, the obviousness of one action makes the other boring and unreal for the player (!). H. is shown or left to the player where Lucas hides the evidence, it is then logically no challenge for Carla, who is also controlled by the player, to find it. The only solution to this problem is to anticipate one of the two actions through the game. In Fahrenheit, the first act is actually anticipated. The player cannot control how Lucas hides the evidence, nor does he get to see it.

The dissolution of bipolar structures (good - bad), as is often the case in computer games with a personal, subjective narrative style, is also due to the authorial-objective perspective. This makes sense in Fahrenheit because the obvious adversaries Lucas and the police officers cannot be pressed into this pattern. In a bipolar pattern, the police officers would definitely have to be the representation of the good. Since they are the opponents of Lucas, he should be the "bad guy". This seems implausible, because Lucas has physically committed a murder, but his body was not under his control, his disposition, his "I" is innocent - his body was only the executive puppet. The character constellation in Fahrenheit is anything but one-dimensional to be classified into good and bad. One can even go so far as to suggest that Lucas and the officers have the same goal in theory - to solve the causes of the murder. There are complications within the search, however, as the officers end up with Lucas Kane, whose physical shell carried out the murder.

Elements from games and films

Unlike most PC games, Fahrenheit does not focus on the game itself; it is rather about experiencing the story and continuing it.

Adventure

There are almost no puzzles like in classic adventure games ; the player only performs obvious and simple tasks. In this way, the player is not held up for a long time with the solution of puzzles, which should serve a continuous narrative flow and ultimately the tension. However, experienced players are not challenged by the simple tasks. An inventory with which objects are collected in Adventures and used in the appropriate place does not exist in Fahrenheit either. Conversations, on the other hand, are similar to other adventure games, but have a time limit, so that a player cannot take as much time as he likes to choose an answer. In addition, possible answers are limited to broad topics, not to exact sentences that are then spoken by the protagonist.

Action

If the game character has to perform difficult and quick actions such as fights or car chases, the game requires that you press specified keys quickly. The player can influence combat or action scenes much less than in a classic computer game, in which the player himself has to perform jumps and punches under time pressure. Longer parts of the game consist of sequences in which symbols light up on the screen and the player must immediately type in the appropriate key combination without errors. If he does not succeed, the hero dies and the game is over. This system, already known from the Adventure Shenmue, was very popular with some players . Others, however, found it annoying.

Movie

The developers placed much more emphasis on the staging of the individual scenes. The camera work, which has always played a subordinate role in regular computer games, in Fahrenheit follows the style of a feature film . Dialogues are often shown in cut close-ups, in action scenes the camera pans around the people, which is reminiscent of action films . Slow motion effects, a stylistic device typical of action films, are also used in Fahrenheit. Especially within the cutscenes, the characters' voiceover comments are shown based on the narrative strategies of the cinema .

Effects like flashbacks or split screen (as with 24 ) are features that are more used in films than in games. Similar to computer-animated films, the characters look through the use of motion detection ( motion capturing ) lifelike and natural, the choreography of the fight scenes is compared to movies, while other PC games often show edged movements.

The feature film as a reference medium is also nominally referred to within the game: The individual game to be opened by the player is referred to as “film” in the menu. In a preceding tutorial, Chief Designer David Cage introduces himself as a director and author.

Production notes

In January 2015, a new edition of the game was released under the title Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered . The game is currently only available as a download . The textures have been revised and the game now supports a higher resolution. While the original game from 2005 only supported a maximum resolution of 1024 × 768 pixels, the revised version supports a maximum resolution of 2880 × 1800 pixels. It is possible to switch back and forth between the old and the new graphic by pressing a button.

reception

Fahrenheit received positive reviews almost across the board. The Metacritic review database aggregates 41 reviews to a mean of 85.

Web links

Fahrenheit at MobyGames (English)

Individual evidence

↑ GameStar.de: Tobias Ritter: Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered - HD new edition released. January 29, 2015, accessed July 16, 2016 .
↑ ^a ^b Metacritic.com: Indigo Prophecy. Retrieved January 24, 2020 .

[1] GameStar.de: Tobias Ritter: Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered - HD new edition released. January 29, 2015, accessed July 16, 2016 .

[MC-2] Metacritic.com: Indigo Prophecy. Retrieved January 24, 2020 .