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David Cage's best start at the helm of Quantic Dream: Fahrenheit
This week has been a roller coaster at work and in Hive, I spent some days leading a group of new workers in the company while in Hive was happening all the commotion about HardFork and the balance that this would lead to the Blockchain, it has been a smooth transition and I have had the opportunity to learn much more about Hive and its community, and although I have not played too many video games apart from Observation which I already did a review, today I want to talk about one of the most atypical experiences I could play when I was still just getting to know the PC and the whole gamer world behind them, curiously this game is aligned with the personal taste that I keep to this day, games with a careful narrative from start to finish, with a leisurely gameplay that is not afraid to put me to explore and solve puzzles in various areas of the game. This game also happens to be critically acclaimed for having a story and mechanics that challenge the adventure games of the time, which in the mid-2000s had not been able to achieve considerable success in the market.
Fahrenheit begins with an unusual murder in which we are actively involved because we are the ones who execute this assault in a bathroom in which we are trapped and we must determine why we have done this, and how to escape without sinning enough to prevent this from happening again, that is the initial concept that Fahrenheit grabs to give us a story with an excellent script, decisions and characters in a game that is not limited to have us controlling only one character but we will be constantly passing between characters like police officers Carla Valenti and Tyler Miles who will be in charge of the case as well as some friends of our possible murderer Lucas Kane who is now forced to escape and find a way to solve this mystery before the police department catches him.
From the beginning this adventure is quite distant from the graphic adventure games that we were used to Lucasart for example with its sense of humor and good vibes, as the studio of the then visionary David Cage approached this title with a more mature perspective at the argumentative level but knowing how to direct the mechanics to attract both old wolves and new users of the generation. The gameplay of this title is unique and while it relies heavily on exploration we will have different points where the screen will be divided between the characters so that we happen to see up to two or three different perspectives of the characters we control, with different camera angles and at different times that will give us details about the murder and how it happened, also providing a depth and immersion in the plot details that would go unnoticed and that in Fahrenheit grab all the limelight, there are times where we must control the characters and discover clues or making decisions that have an effect on the other characters in the game.
The game also has a strong point in its gameplay, which is focused on two main aspects, exploration and decision making, both addressed in a masterful way, decision making on the one hand gives a bit of perspective on future games of this genre, having a kind of decision system where our character will change attitudes and will develop others as a result of the decisions we make in the game, I already tell you that the game does a tremendous job relating each of the facts with the mental and physical states of the characters reaching extreme points.
Another feature that took me by surprise after replaying it is how its cinematographic style has been adopted long after by the hybrid productions of many giants of the industry, without going any further Black Mirror conjugates very well in some episodes where you can make decisions about the plot, but also Fahrenheit also mimics much of what we can find in the movies, having a script and an atmosphere that simulates many of the trillers that we can see in Hollywood, and this seems to me a fair beginning of what soon after was going to be the trademark of the house for David Cage, who was going to use this inspiration in the cinema and movies to make his games much more cinematic, in Fahrenheit we can see the first sketches of these ideas also in the graphics that occupies the game, focusing on the human expressions of the protagonists and in the ambience.
Although time hasn't done this game any good I think even today it's still a great adventure game to play, it's not too long and has a plot full of surprises that are not easy to figure out, I think Fahrenheit also gave a hint of what adventure games were going to be years later when Telltale Games took many of the mechanics that included games like this and enhanced them along with a characteristic graphic style, anyway I think David Cage and Fahrenheit are works that made a hole in the video game industry in a very elegant way, putting something completely innovative in the market.