With the recent resurgence of “interactive movies” and FMV adventures, and increased ease of producing them at an adequate quality, it’s getting harder to identify from the start what could and what couldn’t be interesting. She Sees Red, for example, looked very promising. An interactive thriller from a Russian (I think?) studio with good actors and high quality production. In reality, though? Not very good.
As an interactive movie, not an adventure game, this basically works as a movie where at certain points you make one of two choices and as a result create a new branch of the storyline which might influence the future events or create new paths through the story. There aren’t that many of those, but with the ones that are in the game you can get vastly different outcomes and several endings. Functionally it’s fine. The production quality is fine. But the story is just so bland, predictable, unexciting and not interesting to follow.
Unlike, say, Late Shift which spends time to develop the characters, get them and the players into truly high stakes situations and tell the story with a more or less consistently good pace, She Sees Red is like watching someone make a John Wick fan film. Even the actors chew the scenery so much at times, with their smirks and over the top delivery, despite also being clearly capable of delivering a good performance. As a result, even though “you can learn more of the story if you play more”, there’s little motivation to do that and experience more of the game. She Sees Red isn’t terrible, but it’s not really worth the little time it takes to play as there are simply far better interactive movies out there.
I totally agree with you