The reason the game Voyeur (from Interplay and Philips Interactive) sounds so familiar is that it's a resurrected CD-i title from early last year. As one of the first products for the budding platform, it caught some attention with its sexual overtones and murder mystery plotline.
On the other hand, as a PC title, it is very easy to ignore.
The player has no real identity, but his neighbors sure do! You have been set up in an apartment across the street from self-made billionaire Reed Hawke. (If I were a self-made billionaire, I'd make sure my house was far away from any apartments. But that's just me.) Hawke is considering making a run for the United States presidency, and is probably going to announce his candidacy after the weekend.
That's where you come in. Whoever you are, your sponsor has some very nasty suspicions about Hawke, and has hired you to try and get video evidence of some kind of serious wrongdoing. With said evidence made public, Hawke will certainly not be able to run for office.
As it turns out, the wrongdoing involved is the murder of a family member! This would be a real shocker, except that your instruction manual tells you about it on page 1. Since who-dun-it is not really a question, you have to figure out who Reed Hawke is going to do it to.
To do this, you use your camcorder to pick up any bits of dialog or action that you can. There's also lots of clues strewn around for you to check out. As it turns out, the camcorder interface is not only unrealistic, but astoundingly so. You are somehow able to flip through magazine clippings from your apartment across the street, occasionally you can even pick up a character's thoughts as an audio clue! Apparently, these "psychic" powers take their toll on the power supply. The battery pack only lasts for about five minutes, and then you lose all contact with the building you're supposed to be watching until you have a newly charged battery. This charging period can last between half an hour and four hours! Fortunately, every activity at Hawke Manor takes place in neatly timed intervals.
Most of these well timed events revolve around sex. With a name like Voyeur, is that such a surprise? Hawke's staff are doing it, Hawke's immediate family are doing it, the staff is doing it with the family and vice versa. Even Hawke, a widow, is occasionally doing it with his sister. This story's got all the subtlety of a Days Of Our Lives episode. Indeed, most of the people who buy Voyeur probably couldn't care less about the murder mystery and want to see the sex. There's even a security screen to keep out the minors who shouldn't see the sex. There's only one thing wrong with this.
The sex isn't there.
At least, no more than on network television. There's lots of scenes with the characters parading around in their undies, ready to hop into the sack. There's even the making of a lesbian scene at one point, and then . . . the camera turns off. It's not out of power yet, it's just turned off before you could see anything juicy. This is not going to be particularly exciting unless you've got a real underwear fetish.
Most of the game is taken up with digitized video stuck onto computer rendered sets. Keep in mind that this game was developed a full year before the release of Under A Killing Moon. It looks it. The video is badly pixelated and there is just no suspending your belief enough to picture the actors actually inhabiting the rooms they appear to be in.
But Voyeur does have a couple of genuine low level celebrities in its cast. The murderous Ethan Hawke, I mean, Reed Hawke is played by Robert Culp, best known for his work in I Spy and The Greatest American Hero. His sultry, sick sister is Grace Zabriskie, Laura Palmer's mother from the cult classic Twin Peaks. She's right in her element here, overacting with the best of them.
I'd love to say that Culp and Zabriskie are somehow the high point in this game, but they don't act any better than anyone else on the cast, and that's not saying much. I'd like to at least be able to say that it's nice to have faces you recognize in the story, but the video is sometimes so blocky that the characters barely look human.
But most of all, Voyeur was already a pretty bad game when it came out. Not many people bought it, and the only reason to re-release it on PC CD-ROM is to catch unsuspecting gamers who haven't heard of it with their pants down. Now you know better.
