“You won’t be just looking around you in Fahrenheit – you’ll also have to interact with your environment,” advises a digital David Cage in the game’s opening tutorial, as if that were something that any gamer should need to be told. A prompt shows how to open a door with the right analogue stick. “Do it slowly to really feel you’re controlling your character’s hand.” Like much of Fahrenheit, it conjures feelings of mixed affection and mild embarrassment.
Here is a game that’s trying to do something different, really trying, but it’s so painfully self-conscious that it trips over itself with heartbreaking frequency. When it does get things right, though, Fahrenheit opens our eyes to a new way of experiencing videogames – particularly, how they might deal with the troubling juxtaposition of a fixed narrative with a wilful player.
Fahrenheit was an attempt to get away from the preoccupations with guns, cars, breakneck pace and superficial emotions that Cage perceived as the medium’s constraints. It was intended to be a developed story, one that the player could bend and mould subtly, engage with and feel intertwined with on more than the base level that compels us to rescue the princess, defeat the bigger baddie or find the next checkpoint. The irony is that in trying to get away from the traditional definition of what a videogame ought to be, Quantic Dream managed to create something that was unmistakably, irredeemably a videogame – a bizarre, incongruous science-fiction tale of sentient AI, global paranormal conspiracy and slow-motion action sequences, told largely through minigames and QTEs.
Fahrenheit’s cinematic ambitions are clear from the outset, when the digital Cage guides you through its ‘first day of shooting’ in the most preposterously self-aware tutorial in gaming history, and from real-life Cage’s name dropping: Hitchcock, Lynch, Brazil, Dark Water, Jacob’s Ladder. It cloaks Start, Quit and New Game cutely but obviously as Play, Stop and New Movie. It drops token literary references too, to Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Tempest (its ominous black birds might even recall Poe’s Raven), but Cage’s love affair is with cinema, and nothing else. In the context of a game that presents itself as an interactive movie, such videogame staples as button prompts and collectibles feel like awkward, frivolous toys dropped arbitrarily into an otherwise sombre setting.
From the outset, then, Fahrenheit is clearly a game at odds with itself and with its medium. The token attempt to keep the player engaged in its many, many cutscenes through button prompts that only sometimes have anything to do with what’s happening on the screen is at best mildly awkward, and at worst frustrating and disengaging.
Elsewhere, though, Fahrenheit gets us to relate to its characters in a more effective way than film is able to – by making us a part of their intimate lives. We guide Lucas, Carla and Tyler through the most ordinary everyday events – taking a shower, answering the phone, searching for keys, getting dressed, hunting for wine glasses in kitchen cupboards. Lucas can die, not from falling off a ledge or getting in the way or a bullet, but because we’ve failed to take care of him, to pay attention to the tiny little things that keep his sanity; something as simple as washing his hands and face in the morning or taking a drink in a spare moment can make the difference, later on, between success and suicide.
It’s this revelry in the mundane that defines the experience of playing Fahrenheit, that shapes its storytelling far more than its well-shot cutscenes or its occasionally snappy dialogue. It’s a story told and experienced largely through non-events. The opening murder is a dramatic set-piece, and the game’s cutscenes are hardly lacking in action, but we spend most of the game embroiled in everyday and often quite laborious tasks. It creates a palpable sense of place, too; Lucas’ lonely little flat, with its dull greys and browns, packing boxes, dank little bathroom and lone carton of milk in the fridge evokes understated sympathy for him.
Fahrenheit juxtaposes the mundane with the absurd, the out of the ordinary – it tells a story that no sane person could possibly relate through actions that are familiar to us all. The plot abandons any early semblance of authenticity the second Lucas is attacked by giant invisible computer-generated fleas in the bank and never looks back, spiralling into an increasingly insane and convoluted sequence of events – it’s as if, unable to decide which plot thread to follow, Cage simply went for everything at once, from voodoo to sentient AI to possession, invisible murderers, global conspiracy theories, Mayan mythology, reincarnation, messianic prophecy and a very confused commentary on determinism. By the end, Lucas has been chased by imaginary angels and huge bugs, developed superpowers and uncovered a counter-conspiracy for world domination masterminded by tramps.
In the face of all its achievements, not least the fantastic opening in a diner restroom in the moments immediately following a murder, the most absurd moments unfortunately prove to be Fahrenheit’s most memorable. It’s impossible to forget the unintentionally hilarious sequence in which Carla finds herself trapped in an insane asylum in the dark (evidently she has a paralysing terror of sauntering shirtless men in orange trousers), or the scene where Lucas backflips over exploding cars for two minutes, or the moment when he randomly wakes up in a forest with a Mayan priest and gets chased by a panther.
Despite all the unadulterated nonsense, though, Cage can really write a thriller. There’s just enough intrigue to push the player through even its most uncompromising moments. He can also write a good character, some of the time. At its best, Fahrenheit exemplifies some of the most natural characterisation in videogames, but also the most absurd. At one end of the spectrum we have Lucas’ believable relationship with his ex, Tiffany, whose visit early in the game to collect the few things still left in Lucas’ apartment can lead to a believably melancholy conversation and a sex scene which, though hardly touching, isn’t out of place; by contrast, his sudden, awkward and entirely inexplicable love affair with Carla is horribly jarring.
Fahrenheit’s chief triumph is the subtle layering of cause and effect that elegantly alters the flow of events. Consequences are laid almost imperceptibly on Lucas’ shoulders. The way that your decisions can come back to haunt you – a missed bloodstain, a dropped piece of paper – is subtle and quietly brilliant. It also pulls a neat trick by forcing you to work towards your own downfall, putting you in control of both fugitive and pursuers and teasing you with the power to help or hinder the investigation.
The game’s structure is prescriptive, but it manages to make the player feel like they have influence and choice, that what they do or don’t do might change something. Even if practically none of your actions can affect the ultimate outcome, you feel like they might have. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in Fahrenheit’s famous opening sequence. The instinct, confronted with a dead body, is to either cover your tracks as painstakingly as possible or flee immediately, and the game not only accommodates both of these approaches, but everything in between. This, surely, is the key to natural interactive storytelling – a hint at how interactive stories might evolve, should game writers ever achieve mastery of their tools.
Fahrenheit is a story that absolutely couldn’t be told any other way. It’s strangely at home in its medium despite its milieu of incongruous elements. It didn’t weave a believable and consistent tale, it didn’t deliver a work of cinematic excellence, it didn’t propel games into a new era of brilliantly empathic narrative. But it did harness a lot of the things that make games a unique and engaging medium for fiction and, almost by accident, it succeeds at being exactly what it didn’t want to be – an example of videogames’ traditional limitations as well as their potential.
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