7/130
Group 6 - GRAPHIC STYLE - With live persons - She Sees Red
Review here: Alphadoriest's Review of She Sees Red | Grouvee
‘As a value proposition, even at its cheaper price point, an intense appreciation of FMV games is a must to equipoise its abruptness. As a fan of the genre myself, She Sees Red is as well shot and satisfying an FMV story as I’ve encountered. Its modest ambition as interactive entertainment won’t bother you whilst you’re fully immersed in its economy shower of intrigue. In She Sees Red I see potential.’
Ugh… ‘a value proposition.’ Games are art, right?
I do like my FMV games. It’s always refreshing to be freed from motion capture or stilted puppet facsimiles and the the digital impersonations of objects in our shared hallucination we call reality. Anything to not have to sit through another crunch-rushed Telltale animation of a face shifting around like emotion subtitles for an alien. Some, like Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker, can be mechanically stimulating - liberated from the assumed constrictions that come with no direct control. Others, like Late Shift, can flex the cinematography muscles to simply fulfil the fantasy of a choose-your-own-adventure film.
She Sees Red is the latter, but compared to Late shift, even shorter and with smaller choice-web. Considering its 30 minute runtime, the omission of a scene skip function for quick replays is baffling - or not, if you’re being cynical. It’s just binary choice clicks for good and ill.
It’s easy to be negative, but it’s so darn well shot and the story and acting land their respective tricks, that I played each run-through back to back (going over a lot of the old scenes as I did so) quite happily. It passes my logic test by not having any Telltale-like cause and effect defying rumbles in the universe. Overall, in terms of experimental FMV, it’s decidedly reserved. It’s merely testing its footing whilst being fully wired up with the emergency services on speed dial.
BUT… more of this kind of thing please. The more FMV there is, the more likely someone will hit it out of the park. Until then, do you want to…
