I remember when the idea of an “interactive movie” sounded like something absolutely amazing. What we got instead were barely interactive and rather poor in quality adventure games with questionable Dragon Lair-ish design. After a while, even rather well put together proper adventure games built on live action scenes stopped happening and after the late 90s there were almost no games based around the idea of using FMVs as a basis. That is, until several years ago when “FMV games” started popping up again here and there. They were mostly traditional FMV adventure games, like the return of Tex Murphy or Contradiction, and as such it wasn’t surprising to see them learn on the mistakes of older titles of the similar sort. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Late Shift is very much that “interactive movie” idea that you’d see with Dragon Lair and dread to remember. And that it somehow works this time.
You read that right – this isn’t your traditional adventure game with live action scenes instead of 2D or 3D renders. This is a movie, a movie that keeps on going without pausing, that occasionally presents you with choices that you can make. Choices that shape the way next scenes develop. The way they fixed the issue with the old interactive movies? Simple – you don’t just present players with “wrong choices”, rather with “different” choices that lead the story either to the same destination differently, or to a new destination, until the story “corrects” itself to the main story path, except with new context or new or lost possibilities. I haven’t played the game enough to know how much and if it can contradict itself (from what I’ve seen on other people’s experiences, it might get a bit weird depending on your choices), but from what I’ve seen, the narrative is pretty solid and the tale is exciting.
As such, I did enjoy this project, even if I don’t particularly want to experience its arguably “main gimmick” of interactivity further, since I was very happy with how the story worked out in my case and it was a nice 1.7 hour heist movie experience. There are a couple questionable choice wordings, a few quirky character moments that would undoubtedly look a bit weird whatever choices you take, but otherwise, it’s a really fun interactive movie with a really good soundtrack.