Imagine if Rockstar made a Grand Theft Auto 2.5, keeping the old GTA's top-down perspective, borrowing GTA III's tongue-in-cheek 70s-crime-flick ambience, and adding in GTA V's heist mode. That's the fantastic aesthetic groundwork The Masterplan lays as the basis for its take on the heist genre, and God bless it for the attempt to do something that cool with it. The problem here is that the game pairs its delightful dreams of tense, top-down robbers-n-thieves flavor with a cumbersome point-and-click adventure game mechanic that murders any immersion in the missions right from the first moment you gain control.
That's not an exaggeration. You get a cool introduction, in which your antihero gets sent to the slammer for a crime he didn't commit, vowing to get revenge on the society that wronged him. The intro gets you all pumped to bust out and take to the mean streets--and then the game starts, and your character, Joey, wanders his dank jail cell, a single guard outside, when someone manages to get him an unloaded gun.
Livin' that country jail life.
Here the game shows off its best gimmick: its gunpoint mechanics. Keeping a gun trained on someone allows you to give them orders, like opening a door for you, walking hands up into an empty room so you can lock the door behind them, or knocking out another NPC at your behest. It opens up all sorts of possibilities for how to approach heists, and as long as the intimidation level--represented by a slow-cycling circle icon--stays up, you can get through just about any scenario without ever having to fire a shot or move stealthily around a place looking for the right insertion point.
The problem is that the game demands smooth, fast, reflexive actions, but something that absolutely begs to feel as fluid as Hotline Miami instead plays like The Sims. The simple act of having your character pull a gun on another character in a hectic, time-sensitive moment involves hitting the spacebar to go into slow motion, left clicking to select your character, right clicking your character to open the radial, selecting a gun, right clicking again to have the character face the enemy, and praying that the NPC is close enough to your character's vision cone to stop whatever they're doing. If not, you'll need to click a point near the enemy and have your character saunter over, without the benefit of slow motion, which more than likely means the NPC will get to call for reinforcements, which you don't want because that typically gives you 30 seconds until a cop convention forms.
Fun mini-game: Read all the interstitial comments in Rorschach's voice from Watchmen.
The first stage presents a fun, tense scenario of convincing a guard to open your jail cell while you've got him covered with a gun. Your options are plentiful and great. You can knock him unconscious or lead him outside and then knock him unconscious. You can lock him in your cell and make him hand over the key. All these great options involve a slow, choreographed, dialed-in set of button presses that bore you when it should be exciting.
This sad contradiction permeates the whole game. You pick places to hit from a varied set of locations around the city, ranging from cleaning out a mini mart, a diner, and an arcade up to elaborate multi-criminal capers at seaside resorts, banks, and casinos. All these places teem with security monitors, proprietors who likely carry the keys to the rooms with the big scores, armed guards, and any number of good Samaritans who won't hesitate to run to a payphone to bring down the long arm of the law. With enough money, you can hire a set of disposable antiheroes to help you take the joint down, but that doesn't guarantee your success. The whole thing could go pear-shaped with one false move, but a sense of urgency never exists when you have to wrestle with the controls more than you do with fragile explosives, a super loud safecracking device, or a captive hostage's will to live. One of the saddest failures I encountered in the game involved forcing the owner of a diner outside at gunpoint, having a bystander run in and try to stop me, having to take my gun off the diner owner to deal with that problem, only for the owner to try to give me a bum-rush. The selectable reticle indicators for all three characters converged with mine and I couldn't move away from either character, leaving me to get beaten to death.
So, uh, this heist went well.
The tragedy is that the game completely has the right spirit otherwise. The game's tone conveys 70s grit while staying animated and tongue in cheek, and the score is full of spy-flick flutes and wah-wah guitars. Heists have multiple approaches, and the gunpoint mechanics are a great elaboration of an idea Payday and its ilk have been paying lip service to for years now. The idea is ripe for building a game around, but it can't fly playing it so slow and technical. Many a thief has probably had to come up with a plan B for when a heist goes wrong, but here, even the simple act of walking into a building involves creating plans A through F. As such, The Masterplan feels like the most tragic kind of missed opportunity: a set of viable ideas rendered inert in practice.
All it took for Her Story to become brilliant was a name. It's not a moment the game is counting down to, and out of the context--the context I'd built over the half hour or so--it could even be written off or missed. But that's where Her Story gets its power. It's a 200-piece psychological puzzle offering the cheap, gamey thrills of putting two parts together, but it is much deeper, darker, and even sadder when you realize what the picture might be when it's finished.
The catch-22 is that talking about the game involves a spoiler minefield. Every word that inches up to what Her Story ultimately becomes cheapens what's waiting for players down this particular rabbit hole. One should at least have a grasp of the setup, You boot up the game, and you're presented with an ancient relic of a mid-90s police database, already keyed into a series of grainy VHS interviews with a shy, evasive woman speaking to an unseen, unheard interrogator. The single keyword searched for is "murder."
That's just what a guilty person would say, right?
Five videos are pulled up at the start totaling maybe 5 minutes, and all the videos raise a litany of questions about who this person is, what she has done, where she is right now, and why she did it. How you go about finding answers to those questions is completely up to you. The transcripts of every interview this woman has given while in custody are searchable within the database. You can type in any word or series of words this woman may have said at any point during the interview process, and the database will give you clips of any interviews in which she said those words. For example, typing in the word "husband" will return a clip in which she talks about meeting, marrying, and possibly fighting with her husband. When she mentions her husband by name, typing in his name will lead you to another set of clips, in which she might mention the suspicion that he may have cheated on her, which might lead you to type in "cheat" or "affair." Some clips may include more clues than others, which is why you can use the note-taking system for each clip to type in a free-form note and keep your thoughts organized during the search. This is recursive Wikipedia-search detective work at its most meaningful and interesting. The system wouldn't have been terribly out of place in any number of laughable, Digital Pictures-quality full-motion-video games from the early 90s, yet the ambitions at play here overshadow all of those former attempts.
The game depends entirely on player curiosity to drive the broken narrative forward, asking you to take a big risk in trusting that the truth is actually out there. It's entirely possibly to get stuck on a string of minutiae, forgetting a key phrase and winding up hopelessly lost. If a "game over" is to be had, it comes from simply losing one's way through the narrative. It's relatively simple to do, especially if you're not entirely invested from the beginning. That said, virtually all the answers are in the interviews if you're tenacious and observant. No one clip is the linchpin to the whole thing, though the big revelations are there, and a rather out-of-place chat program acts as a sort of ersatz signal that you've seen the clips necessary to say, "Pat, I'd like to solve the puzzle." The signal doesn't necessarily mean that you should stop looking, however.
In case you're wondering, no, typing in "REDRUM" does not give you Jack Nicholson videos.
You won't necessarily want to stop looking, either. The woman--played wonderfully by Viva Siefert--isn't necessarily on the defensive as much as willfully omitting what becomes painfully, coldly obvious from a simple slip of the tongue or an uneasy body movement. When the truth finally leaves her lips, it comes with such a preternatural calm for something that should set off alarm bells for anyone else watching, which makes the character and the performance even more affecting. Each layer of the mystery you've managed to peel away and witness and each struck nerve breaks this woman's carefully crafted quilt of lies down to a series of frightening frayed ends.
Game director Sam Barlow was responsible for the terrific Silent Hill: Shattered Memories a few years ago, and even though Her Story contains no eldritch, sword-wielding horrors, or disfigured mannequins, this game has a kindred feeling with the best entries in that series. Through our own curiosity we listen to this woman speak, her honesty treading on every day, deep-seated feelings about menial life, her parents, sex, social responsibilities, and the kind of seething resentment that causes people to do terrible things when they think no one's watching. Just because it never shifts towards the supernatural doesn't mean it doesn't inspire something quietly distressing when hearing someone else tell it.
Defragging the murder drive.
If anything, Her Story is more distressing because these feelings are familiar; we experience the same distress hearing the friends and neighbors of the world's worst people describe them as quiet and keeping to themselves. We have an intimate level of knowledge about this woman in the wake of her own personal tragedy, and the strength of Her Story as a narrative experience is that even as the right clips put the truth in sharp relief, your ability to uncover it is both satisfying and horrifying. This feat of intelligence and insight sticks with you long after the credits roll.
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