A Brief Primer On Pendulo
Pendulo is a studio I never thought I would cover with my "Quest for the Worst Adventure Game" series on Giant Bomb, and there's no specific malice behind my reasoning. As I will discuss shortly, their games today have strayed away from traditional adventure game conventions to resemble more the dialogue-based action-adventure-oriented aspects of L.A. Noire or the latter titles from Telltale Games. Even if I was to go back to their earlier titles like the Runaway series, The Next Big Thing, or Yesterday, Pendulo's point-and-click interface always felt rudimentary, with their item combination puzzles rarely amounting to anything that required deep thought or constant head bashing. That said, The Next Big Thing and Yesterday continue to be two works of theirs that I will defend as worthwhile experiences, even if the latter can't quite stick its landing.
Suppose you haven't heard of Pendulo at all. In that case, you either have missed their games constantly being on sale for a buck whenever a Steam or GOG sale rolls around, though they are not nearly as egregious about that as Daedelic's Deponia games. Alternatively, like most, you might have stayed away from the turn-of-the-century European PC adventure games that were keeping the genre "alive" in the early 2000s. When people ask me what I mean by "modern European PC adventure game," I either point them at the Deponia series, The Runaway games, possibly Deck13's Jack Keane or Ankh series, or Frogwares' Sherlock Holmes games, and by then, they get the milieux. I'm talking about that weird gap when North American studios turned their back on the genre, but right before TellTale took the world by storm with The Walking Dead or Kickstarter made retro-styled point-and-click games cool again. It was a weird time, but what sometimes gets lost is how many of those interstitial games came from studios with storied histories and decades of experience.
Pendulo stands as "Spain's longest-running active game development company," and within the borders of its homeland, it has become a point of national pride. Nonetheless, the studio has weathered multiple cases of nearly filing for bankruptcy, even after putting out quality games and titles. For those unaware, while the original Runaway proved to be a monumental critical and financial success, after the game completed development, its producers had to pink slip virtually everyone, including themselves, after it finished production. Not only had the game's initial distributor filed for bankruptcy right as it was ready for an English release, but they had also struggled to transition from 2D pixel-based art to fully rendered 3D models without professional training. Pendulo started as a group of college friends who decided to make video games after graduating. Their team started with just a handful of personnel before expanding to the mid-thirties. The whole fiasco of how the first Runaway saved the studio has an essay on Wikipedia I strongly recommend you check out if you want to do a deep dive into the studio.
Pendulo has also made its fair share of mistakes, the clearest example being when it took five years to make Runaway 2. After having a bite at the critical success apple, they made the same mistake we have seen all too many times with smaller outfits. They tried to put too many recent gaming trends in their sequel in hopes of broadening their potential audience. It is a tale as old as time. Following the Runaway sequels, Pendulo hit it out of the park with The Next Big Thing. Still, the issue was that they misjudged the market and didn't realize that the demand for a comedic point-and-click adventure game with B-tier stylings and production values wasn't what it once was, and the game was a financial disaster. This was even after Pendulo cut its staff to fifteen people and limited the game's development time to 18 months. That means they learned from the experience and observed recent developments in the genre to plan their next title, right? Well, no. With Yesterday, Pendulo viewed the financial struggles of The Next Big Thing as an indictment against comedic point-and-click games and decided the solution was to make something gritty but keep the same game engine and core gameplay intact. Unsurprisingly, Yesterday also was a flop, and with two titles that did not perform, the studio was on the brink of failure before they decided to throw in the towel and leave the genre they had rested their laurels on for over twenty years.
But Wait, What About The Puzzles?
After Yesterday commercially failed, Pendulo went through a two-year period where they resorted to keeping the lights on by porting all of their games to mobile instead of spearheading new game projects. The strategy is incredibly similar to the "lost years" of Revolution Software, which courted a burgeoning network of fans through its Remastered Broken Sword titles and mobile ports. With Revolution, their new fanbase allowed them to fund new game ideas like Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse and Beyond a Steel Sky. Pendulo's mobile years were less successful, but they kept the studio alive during its darkest period. Still, they eventually came into contact with Microids, a French publisher with a penchant for buying the IP rights to classic PC adventure games from defunct European developers. They are also behind the modern Syberia games. The deal with Microids was simple, Pendulo didn't have to worry about its finances as long as Microids picked what games and IPs they worked on, and their first task was a video game adaptation of the European comic series, Blacksad.
Comic books are a black void in my nerd knowledge. As a result, I can't tell you if Blacksad: Under the Skin is an authentic representation of the source material. I thought the game's attempt to convey a noir-heavy story with dialogue choices and open-world exploration was incredibly awkward at times. Pendulo, by hook or by crook, made a narrative game driven by quick time events and BioWare-inspired dialogue choices. It's not a complete failure, but Pendulo was slightly out of their element as the stitching between major scenes and set pieces is virtually nonexistent. For example, after pursuing a lead for the story's core murder investigation, there was a moment when I was left with Blackksad and didn't know that to trigger the next cutscene, I needed to use a telephone. Instead, I spent about twenty minutes scouring for clues and talking to NPCs until I had exhausted their dialogue options. The game's piggybacking and signposting are nonexistent; in an open-world adventure game, that's a problem. There are also some highly awkward and out-of-place minigame and platforming sequences, but that's a problem with virtually every modern adventure game these days. Nonetheless, there are plenty of times when Pendulo works through its issues and struggles to convey some genuinely riveting scenes. For example, there's a scene at a high-stakes poker table where Blacksad needs to maintain his cover, and upon realizing a nearby opponent is cheating, the cheater gets called out and promptly popped in the gut with a sawed-off shotgun. It's a fantastic scene, and there are plenty of others like it sprinkled throughout the game!
Either by the cache of the IP in Europe or people looking to try something different, Blacksad did well enough for Microids to continue its strategic partnership with Pendulo. However, Microids' next task for Pendulo would be far more bizarre. Microids bought the rights to use director Alfred Hitchcock's "name and likeness" in 2018 for reasons no one fully understands. The studio tasked with utilizing this newly acquired IP was none other than Pendulo. Like Blacksad, Vertigo would sidestep familiar point-and-click gameplay in favor of simple object interactions and dialogue choices. And with this, we can now jump into our featured event. Nonetheless, there is something that I need you to understand before we jump into the insanity that is Alfred Hitchcock – Vertigo. As the previous two sections of this blog hopefully lay out, Pendulo was, and to a certain degree today, a studio in crisis. They relinquished their creative freedom for financial stability after the market rejected multiple projects they had spent years toiling away at. If you're still looking at this blog perplexed that there's a video game adaptation of Vertigo that came out in 2021, of all things, you need to understand that was likely not their call.
We Need To Talk About The Story In Alfred Hitchcock – Vertigo
First and foremost, this game is not a faithful reinterpretation of the film. It takes some of the film's key ideas and plot elements and then adds a few modern twists here and there. The game starts with a bang where the main character, author Ed Miller, emerges from the wreck of a car accident and then sees what he thinks to be his father about to leap to his death from the ledge of a nearby bridge. As he clambers to what he believes to be his father, he watches in horror as they jump to their death. During this sequence, you run into the awkward QTEs that litter the entire game and the shortcoming of its dialogue-based choices not feeling valuable. For example, you can choose to either sneak up on Miller's father or run after him, but both options do not impact the overall content of the scene. After the game cuts to black, we juxtapose to the second protagonist in the game, Dr. Lomas, who has been tasked by a friend of Miller to try and help him with his vertigo and psychological trauma. Miller claims the car accident killed his wife and child, but no records exist of these two individuals.
Dr. Lomas is the single most frustrating part of this game. She's an incredibly well-written character with impeccable voice acting, especially in the English translation. She's a strong, older African-American character that has the option of using their job as a clinical psychologist to make people stand down from their positions to listen to her, and I loved those options. Unfortunately, Pendulo's notions of modern cognitive behavior therapy include thinking that hypnosis is the most common form of treatment of PTSD, and Dr. Lomas delves into the tenuous world of dream analysis. Every possible trope you can think about a Hollywood-written psychologist or therapist is here. However, considering a core aspect of the game involves Dr. Lomas forcing Miller to relive suppressed memories, I don't know what more to expect. What I think is less forgivable is how the game has Dr. Lomas oscillate between providing therapy and collecting evidence to exonerate Miller from the current criminal investigation targeting him. In the first meeting between the two, Dr. Lomas asks Miller about the day of the accident instead of treating his vertigo, which was the whole point of her being assigned to Miller in the first place. Then, when you control Lomas, you fan through notes to create a Phoenix Wright-like dossier as if she is leading his defense case.
It is time to discuss flashbacks as a core storytelling device because that's 70% of this game! When Dr. Lomas turns on a panel to induce hypnosis in Miller, he recalls his first meeting with his presumed former wife, Faye. As he recalls, Miller was attempting to make headway with his latest novel when an injured hiker knocked on his door asking for help. She conveniently tells him that she doesn't want him to call for an ambulance because she doesn't have health insurance. She also immediately comes onto Miller, which doesn't render a red flag to him, and they have a one-night stand before he awakens to discover she's no longer beside him in bed post-coitus. I want to say the scene with the two coming closer to intimacy is creepy and incredibly awkward, and I don't ever want Pendulo to do another sex scene ever again. When the original recollection is over, we experience the main gameplay gimmick of Vertigo, reliving memories to remove Miller's gaslighting. Dr. Lomas directs Miller to return to memories, which involves you taking control of Miller and then exploring specific moments in the previous set piece to show the "true scene." In this case, we get early signs that Faye isn't the plucky kind-hearted youngster we thought she was.
After a quick scene wherein you review notes from the first session with Dr. Lomas, we transition to the game's THIRD PROTAGONIST!THIS GAME HAS THREE DRIVING CHARACTER STORIES, which it introduces within the first hour! Our third character is Sheriff Reyes, who enters what appears to be a long-derelict farm with a poorly attended horse and moldy food festering on a dining table. Reyes knew the house's owners personally, as they are the aunt and uncle of his partner, and is investigating the premises after getting a tip of possible foul play. As he enters the building's basement, he discovers the corpse of an older white male with a gunshot wound to the head. We then jump cut to Dr. Lomas as she starts her second session with Miller, and this time, we get a flashback to his childhood. I have no idea who voiced the kid in this game, but they did a great job. The conceit with the flashbacks to Miller's childhood is that he enjoys living in fantasies, with pirates being his childhood fixation. There's a fun bit wherein he hops in and out of frame to pretend to be his imaginary friend, and the way the game animates and transitions to make way for his imaginary playground is the single strongest part of the game, narratively speaking.
I also found the subplot involving Miller's traumatic childhood to be evocative. As you might expect, our initial memories about Miller's childhood are largely rosy and paint a positive light on Miller's father. When we relive those memories, we discover that Miller's father was an alcoholic, and his mother was planning to leave him after she conceived a second child. The issue is that it was a revelatory moment the first time, but the game makes you do this same song and dance three more times, wherein you get a fun little scene with Miller being a kid and going on adventures, and we need to bring Miller back to Earth that he was a victim of child abuse. For example, there's a scene wherein his father drunkenly calls him worthless and doomed to be a failure. And these scenes aren't exactly quick. The first takes about thirty minutes, the second twenty, and the final two about ten to twelve, respectively. Pendulo had an exciting premise and ran it directly into the ground with repetition and what I can only call "padding." It's wild to think, but this game is about twenty hours long, and it would have been far better if it was half that amount.
We Need To Talk About The Plot Twist
After another quick interstitial moment wherein Dr. Lomas reviews her notes from her session with Miller, we transition back to Sherrif Reyes. Reyes finds incriminating evidence, such as a handgun and bottle of whiskey, in the glove box of Miller's recently crashed car. The game then jumps back to Lomas about to start another session with Miller, and this time she asks him to recall the car accident that killed his mother and younger sibling. The original memory involves Miller's father attempting to save him after his car's tire pops, and it teeters on the edge of a cliff before falling, taking Miller's mother and baby sister. The real dream reveals that Miller's father deliberately crashed the car and pushed it over the ridge to prevent his mother from leaving him with the kids.
After achieving this revelation, the sheriff bursts into the scene and claims Miller is the lead suspect in the murder of Samuel Franklin, the dead farmer in the basement. The sheriff attempts to interrogate Miller but makes little headway and storms out shortly after. When Dr. Lomas returns to her hotel room, the sheriff appears at her door, and it is here that we get another sub-plot. Sheriff Reyes likes strong-willed women and is falling in love with Dr. Lomas. Yup, that's something that happens in this game. Suppose you think it represents a massive conflict of interest on Dr. Lomas' part to date the person seeking to throw her patient into jail. In that case, you have to understand that while her professional life is in order, her personal life is a mess, and she's 100% down to date an older man that understands her for who she is and respects her opinion. That may make sense to you on paper, but it's a mess mechanically and narratively. The two are in the middle of a murder investigation, and part of what you do with them is go on dates. You do this two more times!
Oh, and Reyes is the person that was having an extramarital affair with Miller's mother and was the father of Miller's younger sister before her death. There's even a scene where Reyes reveals the scars on his face come from a botched suicide attempt, and instead of viewing all of this as problematic, Lomas canonically agrees to a second date. But that's not the plot twist I'm hinting at here. After Reyes and Lomas engage in their little social, the game transitions to a short gameplay session where we control Faye, Miller's presumed missing wife. During this sequence, we discover that she deliberately injured her ankle to get into Miller's house and had a complex scheme to get into his pants, including lacing a glass of wine with boner pills. In the next scene, she comes up to Miller's door with a baby, and Miller accepts them into his life without asking a question! I have no idea why Pendulo thought it was a good idea to reveal to the player that Faye is a femme fatale and an unreliable character less than halfway into the story. I understand that the movie reveals that Judy Barton/Madeleine Elster is not the character we thought she was, but that reveal happens in the film's climax. In this case, it is PAINFUL needing to go through long investigation scenes with Reyes and Lomas when you already know the answer and are simply waiting for them to connect the dots.
While Faye lived in a guest room with Miller's child, we discover that she was drugging Miller to induce vertigo and sleepless nights so she could dress up as Miller's mother and attempt to haunt him in his sleep. For what we presume to be months, she's been lording over him, telling him to kill himself and asking him, "Why did you do it? Why did you kill your wife and child?" Now, you might be wondering why she's doing this. Well, it turns out that when Miller first got into writing, his manager was Faye's adoptive father. Being mentally unstable, Faye perceived Miller as taking her father's attention away from her. So, many years ago, she tried to frame Miller for pedophilia by uploading compromising pictures of herself on his phone while dressed as a schoolgirl. She gained access to his cellphone after drugging him, but the subsequent police investigation uncovered the truth and found Faye to be the one that staged the entire thing. In response, Faye's adoptive father decided to have her committed to a psychiatric ward. So, yeah, a core part of the story involves a false rape accusation.OH, BUT IT GETS WORSE!
Dr. Lomas suspects there's something more to the bridge and decides to hire a drone pilot to investigate parts that the police investigation may have missed. By the way, this scene is after the nephew of the murdered farmer stormed Miller's house on the verge of murdering him. While using the drone, she finds a backpack, costumes, and a bungee cord, which proves that the scene Miller saw on the bridge at the time of his accident was staged by Faye. On top of that, they even find her body when they notice a cropping of damaged and bent trees in the distance. After Reyes and Lomas review clues and evidence, they learn about a trucker who assisted Faye in setting up Miller's car accident and get to see the entire scene as it happened. Faye dressed up as Miller's father and jumped off the same bridge that took the life of his mother and little sister in hopes of inducing Miller into killing himself. BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! Well, you see, Faye isn't Faye.
Faye is Veronica Carrigan. You may recall that point when I said that her adoptive father was Miller's former publicist and manager, and he had her committed when she falsely tried to accuse Miller of sexual exploitation. So, how did she get out? Well, first, Veronica made friends with her roommate at the psychiatric hospital, knowing her "friend," Lisa, was only a few days removed from being released. After gaining Lisa's trust, she manipulates her into celebrating her upcoming release on the hospital rooftop over a bottle of vodka. They also decide to swap clothes as a sign of their friendship. After getting Lisa incredibly drunk, Veronica/Faye has Lisa walk on the edge of the roof. Then she pushes her over so that she can assume her identity to secure her release from the hospital, somehow guaranteeing the body on the ground would be identified as Veronica. Apparently, this occurs in a world where DNA evidence doesn't exist, and performing autopsies is unheard of. Nonetheless, Veronica's scheme somehow works, and she assumes the identity of Lisa for the rest of her life until dying at the bridge. Dr. Lomas correctly identifies the dead body below the bridge as Veronica because it has a scar on her bottom. We learn that this scar originates from when Veronica deliberately sat on broken glass to get her babysitter fired so she could spend more time with her adoptive father. Likewise, Faye/Veronica/Lisa seemingly spent ten-plus years planning her scheme to get revenge on Miller while being raised by a family that never noticed she wasn't their daughter.
Oh My God, We Need To Talk About The Endings
So, the game's over, right? We know why Faye/Veronica/Lisa wanted to ruin Miller's life and how the car accident was a setup. Well, there's just one problem, the game also decides to resolve all of its sub-plots AFTER it gives you the conclusion to its main story! That's right; the game persists for five hours after settling its core story! The first issue is the location of the dead farmer's wife and Miller's daughter. But before we can solve that mystery, Miller decides to conquer his vertigo by defeating a mental representation of his drunk father, which you beat by clicking the correct dialogue choices when they appear. After vanquishing this specter, Miller confronts his aunt, whom we discover is responsible for gaslighting him into thinking he had a good childhood. She proceeds to disappear for the rest of the game after she admits her brother was a bastard.
After that scene, Miller recalls an earlier conversation with Samuel Franklin, the man that got shot, about how he has a bomb shelter hidden underneath his farm. This clue inspires Miller to head for the farm. Unfortunately, as he attempts to find the bunker, Adam Franklin, Reyes' partner and the nephew of the murdered farmer, attacks him and is convinced that Miller is the man who murdered his uncle, even though all of the evidence we have collected proves it was Faye/Veronica/Lisa. Miller convinces Adam that he can prove his aunt is still alive by locating a bunker on the farm. After finding the bunker, Reyes arrives to help the two, but instead of finding a happy Aunt Esther, they see her brandishing a knife and covered in blood. Delirious, she attempts to kill everyone around her before running to the roof of the barn, which I think is one of the few visual callbacks to the movie. When Miller attempts to comfort Esther on the rooftop, there's a moment when his legs give out, and it mimics one of the most iconic scenes in the film. Nonetheless, after you click the correct options to break Aunt Esther from her stupor, she returns to her senses and surrenders the baby to Miller.
Aunt Esther recalls what happened when Faye/Veronica/Lisa stormed her home and held her and her husband at gunpoint before murdering her husband. With that plot point resolved, the game transitions to Miller busy typing away on his computer, with his vertigo and writer's block entirely beneath him, while his publicist, who is now his father-in-law, is caring for his child in the background and calling for him to take some time from his work to play with his child. The last these two met in person, the other charged the other with rape, but now the two get along perfectly and have joint custody of the baby that only exists because someone wanted to drive Miller to suicide. Likewise, despite discovering that his happy childhood was the byproduct of decades of gaslighting, Miller has no signs of PTSD or long-term psychological trauma.
Oh, and Reyes and Lomas decide to become a couple if you allow them to. They fell in love during a murder investigation where Dr. Lomas decided to make a world record of how many doctor-patient confidentiality rules a single person could break in a week. Still, before the two can officially tie the knot, Lomas drops the whopper that Faye/Veronica/Lisa was sexually molested by her biological father before being put into foster care. This plot development is a one-off line that Lomas makes before kissing Reyes. It's a line the game fobs off minutes after it shares it. I have no words.
Finally, as one last Parthian Shot, the game gives you an idea of what happened to Faye/Veronica/Lisa on the bridge. After pulling off the initial jump from the bridge, she attempted to climb down the bridge safely. However, as she was packing her things, Miller's pet cat, a recipient of Veronica's torture throughout the game, jumps on her back before leaping off her and back on the bridge. The act causes Veronica to become confused and results in her falling to her death, and there's even a moment where you can pick a dialogue option for Veronica to compliment the cat for its scheme. It's the best scene in the entire game, and it's not even a contest.
Regrettably, the game ends with an audio-only flashback to Faye recalling when she got sexually molested by her biological father. This game makes you listen to simulated child abuse. I'm not lying. That's a thing Pendulo put in this game, and you have to let it happen. You can't skip it.
Don't play this game.
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