Indigo Prophecy (otherwise known as Fahrenheit outside of North America) is a seductive atmospheric interactive adventure. It is very successfully presented as a kind of interactive movie – the character’s act out a fantastic story that you are not only sucked into, but feel an absolute part of. The game features brilliant graphics, interactive dialog, cinematic action sequences, puzzle solving and standard adventure game object manipulation/use. The dialog is intelligent, the story is dense and the characters are thoroughly intriguing.

But forget about all that rubbish, because all that *really* matter’s is it’s got the best damn sex sequences I’ve ever seen in a game (Eds note: the U.S. version is censored).

The game’s tutorial features the rather witty David Cage (Director of the game) vocally guiding you to get to grips with the game’s controls. Honestly, the controls and camera shots are one of the game’s weaker elements. The game is mainly played in 3rd person view, and your character and the camera are controlled using a combination of keyboard and mouse. It’s not a bad control system, but it’s far from the best. It’s frustrating during some of the stealthy bits of the game where you must not be spotted and you get caught because of a horrible camera angle.

Much of the game’s object interaction is controlled by specific mouse-motions. For example, when opening a door the mouse must be moved from left to right with the left-mouse-button held. Or, whilst climbing a fence the mouse must be moved from left-right, and then in an arc, to simulate the motion of the character’s arm. It’s hard to describe, but it actually works really well.

Right from the word go I was fascinated by the game’s story-line. You begin the game as Lucas Kane, network technician at a finance company, at possibly the lowest point of his life. You watch the scrubby diner-lavatory scene as Lucas is ritualistically manipulated into clinically murdering another man with three precise stab wounds to the chest. He snaps out of it, eyes wide, and blood dripping from his hands. My God what happened? He couldn’t do anything to stop it. He remembers a cop sitting in the diner; he could need the toilet any minute. There’s no time to lose, the action begins.

Throughout the game you control multiple characters, and during some sequences you may switch between characters at your discretion. This adds to the movie-like feel of the game, and the Indigo Prophecy pulls it off very well because it certainly loses none of the player’s immersion because of it.

From start to finish there’s barely a dull moment in the story. Perhaps the only thing I would mention is that the game tends to lose a little consistency towards the end. It’s possible the game was rushed in these stages, because the plot elements cease to glue together quite as well, and it almost feels like the characters have been doing things without you seeing them.

The mental state of the character you’re currently controlling is displayed as a meter in the bottom right corner of the screen. This moves up and down depending on actions you take, and events that occur in the character’s life. For example, drinking a glass of water improves their mental state, whilst receiving a phone-call from the x-girlfriend damages your character’s mental state. Ultimately this meter can vary from normal (best) to suicidal/deranged (worst). At the worst mental state, it’s game-over.

In the tutorial you are advised to tend to your character’s needs and positively improve your aforementioned mental state at every opportunity, and this advice should be heeded because failing to do so can result in you being trapped in a situation where whatever you do will result in game-over and thus having to reply large sections of the game.

The game features a lot of cinematic action sequences that require combination button presses, and alternative button-tapping. The skill level of these sequences can be adjusted between easy, medium and hard. At normal I found them fairly easy, but that’s about what you want them to be so you can watch the action scenes whilst punching in the key-combos.

And action it certainly is. The sequences in this game are beautifully choreographed, and the character models are almost pristine. You can compare the quality of these graphics to the likes of Half-life 2 without a doubt. Some of the athletic battle scenes later on in the game are a bit too matrix-esque for my liking, but hey, you have to get inspired from somewhere.

I thoroughly enjoyed the 24-style multiple cameras that the Indigo Prophecies uses at certain points in the game also. This feature is generally utilised when some kind of timed event is occurring. A timer appears at the top of the screen, the music kicks in, and the screen shows two, or sometimes three, different cameras with various things going on in each scene. Right at the start of the game this feature is used to show the cop in the diner getting up to go to the toilet while the player, as Lucas, furiously mops up blood off the floor and hides the victim’s body in the toilet.

One of the primary controls the player has over the story-line is via forks in the events that can occur in dialogs. Dialogs become especially tense moments because, not only do they have this massive effect on the game’s story, but they are also timed. The player actually has quite a short-time to decide upon a response for the currently-controlled-character to make during dialogs, if the time runs out then the default dialog option is automatically chosen. More often than not, the default option isn’t the one you want to be going for.

Perhaps my favourite aspect of this game is the character development. The two main characters are especially fascinating, and their complex lives are artfully revealed before the player’s eyes. They become almost instantly likable, and I found myself vastly interested in both of them after only a small amount of play. I don’t think this is something I’ve had in a game to such an extent since Planescape: Torment.

So then, the heroine: Carla Valenti, 28, NYPD Detective. This girl has a very strong personality which is refreshing to see given the inherent weakness of almost all female compute game characters. She’s driven by her desire to discover and deduce, and her obvious deductive ability and dedication to lawful duty makes it very believable that she reached the rank of detective in a male-dominated profession. It’s nice to see that there’s not one special mention of her being a lady in authority.

I have to say though; I did enjoy making Carla roam around her apartment in her underwear for several minutes. But that’s nothing really, because, as I’m sure you know, this game features sex scenes (yes, plural). Let’s not underestimate how hard it is to pull of something like this without it ending up cheap or cheesy. Indigo Prophecy does sex with style and relevance. It comes when you least expect it, it compliments the story-line perfectly, and it’s a comfort to you and your character when it does.

Forget your GTA: San Andreas rubbish, this blows it out the water in terms of graphics, sophistication and style. One of the scenes actually allows for some mouse interaction *cough*, which is possibly a little over the top. But because of the pivotal story-line events surrounding that moment, the seriousness of the game is not lost in the moment of humour (at least, I found it humorous).

The voice acting is perfect. There was only one notable moment when I had a moment of abstraction, realising that one of the actors who was currently talking had already played a previous character in the game. But you’re going to get that kind of thing with computer games, and since there’s not a badly acted moment in the hours and hours of dialog I heard I think I’ll let them off. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the music is also perfect, but it’s certainly up to the standard. It features both emotive modern music and atmospheric orchestral music.

You can see for yourself what the graphics of this game are up to; they’re breath-taking at worst. The character models are very smooth, and they move around the screen realistically. As I mentioned before, the camera angles can be annoying at times, but this is an isolated flaw and it only applies to certain parts of the game.

Summing up – the Indigo Prophecy is unique, artistic, immersive and beautiful. There’s no reason in the world why any self-respecting gamer shouldn’t have this game in their collection. The relatively short completion time (first play through took me just over 10 hours) is a bit of a drawback, but if you think of this in terms of movies then it’s easily an epic – and I think the competence of the story-line aptly matches any Hollywood blockbuster.