Trust, Doubt or Lie

I used to think L.A. Noire wasn’t that good and now I think it may have been too good.

I spent this weekend just gone belatedly celebrating the 30th *cough* birthday of my fellow subeditor and all-round good egg, Tony. In the course of merriment and general alcohol consumption, I had an enlightening conversation with another Ready Up-sourced guest, Simon. The conversation drifted towards games as it naturally would and he made a salient point about L.A. Noire that entirely shifted my perception of it.

My problems with the game are multitudinous but having distilled them, I don’t think the game should be on rails; until I’d spoken to Simon, I couldn’t put my finger on why. I don’t just mean that the missions have to be completed in a specific order, nor that there’s no branching in the storyline. There is a single solution to each case where your choice of who to convict is meaningless, there is a single answer to each question and a single piece of evidence to prove someone is lying. I’m fond of doing things differently but this game, across the entire three-disk-sized experience felt like I was watching a film and was being told what I should think of it.

Bringing this up in my conversation with Simon, he extolled the characterisation of Cole Phelps. Against common opinion, he prefers that character over Jack Kelso. For the spoiler-conscious, stop reading this paragraph and skip to the next. Simon’s opinion is that Phelps was a man racked with guilt, consequently he chose to have an affair because he didn’t believe he deserved the happiness of his married life.

I agreed with him but I have these kinds of discussions about book or film plots, not games. It then dawned on me that the complexity of the stories in the game between the 340-odd characters with human faces and emotions didn’t fit inside a game that made me feel like I was grinding just to get to the next part of the story. The gameplay wasn’t part of the story, it was in-between it.

I would have happily read and recommended a well written book about those characters’ stories but in the form of a game with a very limited gameplay mechanism, the story was too good for the medium.