Ratings and Reviews by dutchmule

"Hollywood Visionary" casts you as a studio head in the 50s, trying to make your first movie to get your studio off the ground. The atmosphere is that of 1950s Hollywood, and is lovingly rendered: everything is period-perfect, and you're surrounded by big names, which really adds to the atmosphere. The NPCs that you encounter are indeed very well written; I have a soft spot for Fish Grundy, but other ones are quite memorable too. (Orson Welles, in particular, is hilarious and a great character.)

Most importantly, the account of the Red Scare and trying to be a studio head in the McCarthy era is just amazing. The character of Creed is great for that purpose : it is well-written enough that you could totally see someone like that existing back in that day, but still manages to say things that from our modern perspective sounds absolutely ridiculous. It's very impressive to manage to portray this aspect that well, while still making it transparent that the whole thing was a travesty of justice and completely, irrationally stupid. I came out of the game reflecting heavily on what is justice, and how politicians sometimes get away with blatant scapegoating that is profoundly unfair; it really resonated with 2016, although I see now in reviews that it also resonates with other events from a few years ago. For that matter, the tense scene near the end is just amazing, as (Spoiler - click to show)the stakes are high (even if you know how ridiculous it is, they could still end you!), and the atmosphere is oppressive; one of the best written scenes I have ever seen and felt in IF.

The meat of the game is trying to get your movie done while managing all sorts of aspects, like money, stress, actors, etc. This was well-done enough, and there are lots of possible choices; it is however mostly linear, and I came out with the impression that some choices always lead to similar conclusions, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I achieved enough variety to get achievements that I wanted to get, but I felt little interest in keeping going; to be honest, the huge number of choices do not actually feel like they're all supported, and sometimes it kind of felt like it was just string substitution. (as in "<your director> loves <your genre>"). Granted, I didn't really explore everything; but I feel like the game wasn't that great at giving me feedback or letting me know that this particular choice was a really good one. Instead, you are given 15 different knobs that you have to monitor, without really knowing how important they are, and it kind of felt (at least for the choices I made, which were mostly careful and not really going to extremes) like it was a zero-sum game, that if I spent more time on something, something else would lose as many points. This may not be true, and maybe you can manage to make a dismal movie or an absolutely great one, but I don't really know how, and I don't even have a good rule of thumb, which doesn't really make me want to try to achieve it. So, it's nice to personalize your movie, basically, but you don't really feel like it has that much weight or importance overall.

In any case, I had a very good time with this game, and the superb writing makes it a 5-star game in my opinion.

I wanted to like this game: investigative journalism in a futuristic noir cyberpunk world, with a city in shambles and gang violence? I love Deus Ex, Urban Chaos, and all that kind of stuff, so I was excited!

Now, two stars might be a bit harsh, but the game unfortunately disappointed me in a lot of ways. First, the setting was unsufficiently developed to me: there were a couple of neat ideas, like (Spoiler - click to show)privacy laws having been made way stricter than our current day and age (how does that work? Does facebook still exist? Is there a special police for that?), but mostly they were skimmed over quickly ((Spoiler - click to show)global warming is merely name-dropped, no mention why there is such poverty or inequality or what changed in the world). To be perfectly honest, it feels like the game could have been set in 2016 without losing much : replace New Angeles by, like, Detroit, use small bluetooth cameras or Google Glasses, (Spoiler - click to show)talk about the Carmat artificial heart and I'm not sure it would end up very different. This is one of my biggest disappointments from the game, since I was expecting more from the setting.

The game is mostly linear, from what I saw and from the length claimed on the CoG website ; this means the replay value is not great (I got 80% of achievements in 2 playthroughs), but actually, even worse is that a lot of choices end up not being real choices. They might affect the statistics, though I didn't track that too hard, but a lot of times the few options converge to the same text a couple of paragraphs later. This took me out of the game, as I felt the decisions had much less weight this way and ended up not surprising me much. There are a few times where the games has actually very different outcomes; unfortunately I only noticed because the game was contradicting itself ((Spoiler - click to show)Katrina sued me when I actually didn't attack her and stayed on my chair, Tracey downloaded images when I didn't record the conversations with Parker or Sloane), which surprised me from a CoG game. So it kind of feels like a linear plot with no room for different playthroughs or choices, which is not great. Adding onto that, the plot itself isn't too exciting, and you mostly get kidnapped (seriously, 3 or 4 times over 10 chapters is too much) by someone guilty who then reveals their plan "but i'd like to keep that off the record". And last but not least, the writing feels bland and sometimes clumsy, not only because the setting is not very developed, but because the style itself isn't great; there's things spelled out that didn't need to be, and a few rather lazy descriptions: the red wine tastes fruity, the dark beer tastes nutty, the bad guy wears a trench coat, and there's literally a nondescript henchman!

Anyway, this was unfortunately a pretty disappointing experience; I would not really recommand this game.