Sometimes, late at night, I log on to the Internet and surf the net aimlessly for hours on end. Invariably I stumble across something that interests me, be it obscure lore about Jack Vance (a favorite author) or a hot new shareware game I've been waiting months to get my hands on. Sometimes I end my Internet session with a feeling of contentment, but sometimes I feel a little overwhelmed by the sheer number of possibilities. Often I find myself running over the same old ground, but just as often I break into new territory and I find something I never expected.
After playing Psychic Detective by Colossal Pictures for the first time, I sat back and tried to think of another game to compare it to. I couldn't come up with any games at all - rather, I found that playing Psychic Detective was much like surfing the net. It isn't something you can easily label as "good" or "bad." It's an unusual game, and individual players' reactions will vary tremendously. All I can really hope to do is describe it, and perhaps you will get a sense of whether this is a product you'll love or hate.
This product is more of an interactive movie than any self-styled interactive movie I've ever seen. That's because regardless of what the player does, Psychic Detective just chugs right along without you.
You play Eric Fox, a psychic who's been turned into a... well... a detective. A mysterious Russian woman (aren't they all mysterious, really?) hires you to find out what happened to her father. Eventually you'll find the bad guy and do battle with him in a strange, stylized game called Black Diamond.
Until the Black Diamond endgame sequence, your main form of interaction is to choose whose head you're going to occupy. You see, your primary power is to enter other peoples' consciousness and view the world as they view it. You can usually only do this when you're physically close to that person, though when you get your hands on a device called a Psychic Collector you'll get more options.
In basic terms, then, your main interaction with the game is choosing perspectives. Sometimes an additional option will appear, allowing you to do something like Run Away or Knock on the Door. Also, you can often touch objects to get an aura reading from them (usually triggering scenes of gratuitous psychedelia). Through these relatively subtle decisions, you can steer the game toward one of its fourteen different endings.
The endgame is a relatively simple affair, complicated only by the fact that your strategy is based mainly on intuition and guesswork. You begin the endgame by picking four game pieces, all of which are icons representing a character or item from the game. They fluctuate in power depending on what's happened in the game - so if a character is dead, his icon is probably a weak game piece in this particular match of Black Diamond.
The format of Psychic Detective has several real strengths, but they will only be appreciated by the gamer who loves interactive movies and has the patience to sit through a good degree of repetition. Let me explain.
First, the strengths. The constant movement of the game makes you feel powerless at first, but after a while it's cool. Many multimedia games claim to be movies, yet they let you get stuck on simple tasks, dying endlessly in Dragon's Lair fashion until you finally get it right. This sort of sticking point is totally foreign to a movie, where the action is constantly in motion. Psychic Detective has a very forgiving feel to it, and you can always be assured of finishing the game if you just keep playing (the whole game is done in less than an hour). The quality of your ending, however, depends on your actions.
I really love the fact that each ending has a name, so you can keep track of which ones you've seen. But to reap maximum benefits from the game and really get a sense of how to affect the action, you must re-play the game many times. Since there's no such thing as "skipping the old video clips" here - it's all in real-time - you will have to suffer along with many of the same plot elements each time you play. Are you patient enough to retain your enjoyment of the game? To be honest, I grew weary after two full sessions.
It's up to you to decide. Are you the sort that loves to replay games? If so, this is rich territory indeed. The game gives the sense of being in a real, functioning world - just jumping back and forth between two characters who are having a conversation is delightful - but it's a brief experience unless you're willing to invest the time and effort to replay countless "what-if" scenarios. Either way, Psychic Detective is a fascinating experience - not quite a game, nor a movie, but an experience. It's not a game that will appeal to a wide base of gamers, but it will be interesting to see what Colossal Pictures comes up with next.
