We started playing L.A. Noire.
So far it's been an interesting experience. Even though it has a thick Rockstar sauce poured over it, the core gameplay is actually about questioning suspects in crime cases (reminds a bit of Heavy Rain once in a while, though the narrative is far less interesting and far more cliché -presumably on purpose, for kitsch value?). It's a bit jarring to see our avatar act much more violently than we expected when we chose between Truth, Doubt and Lie and you really need to get a few questions right to progress (again, this is
not a game: losing is not an option). Once in a while there's a chase scene or some shooting. But if you fail at those three times, the game
offers you an option to skip that sequence. This has been its saving grace for us. Suddenly the whole thing became playable. (I wonder how many years it will take for developers to offer this option on the first try, without requiring failure. But it's a step.)
The graphics are... interesting. The general rendering suffers from that contemporary blockbuster aesthetic where shapes are too sharp and colours too clear, and no amount of clever depth of field can fix it. But there's an option to play in black and white. After reducing the sharpness on our tv set, increasing the contrast and reducing the brightness, the game almost looks like a 40s film noir.
Except of course for the funny face animation... Well, the facial animation is actually quite impressive, but those detailed heads are mounted on much less detailed bodies, so much so that it sometimes seems like the faces are video-textures. It's a strange effect. The only solution will probably be to capture the entire bodies of the actors in the same way as the faces. Not all faces have the same amount of detail, by the way. The main characters look remarkably different from the minor ones.
The acting is pretty decent. But a bit too contemporary/naturalistic for my taste. I would have loved it if they had adopted the cool underacting style of Bogart era movies.
I don't like the writing much. And this Rising Star/Heroes Journey tale is getting very tedious to me.
The music is well done but overly dramatic. I turned it off to listen to the sound effects. And I haven't missed it. There still are some musical cues to help you find objects that can be interacted with.
There's a lot of objects to interact with. That's actually one of the more amusing things to us: just standing still, picking up a banal object and turning it a bit. This is how you find clues for your cases but many objects don't have any purpose. They are decorative. Sometimes they contribute to the narrative.
We're still playing. That's more than we can say of most games. And more than we can say of Grand Theft Auto IV or Red Dead Redemption.
I do recommend that you try it. If only to see the stunning amount of detail that millions of Dollars can produce (and then to realize that it still isn't enough and that this approach is probably a dead end).
