A game that goes all over the place
Indigo Prophecy (or Fahrenheit as it's known here) is an interesting and stylish game. Its quality, however, is hugely variable throughout the game.
The use of splitscreen in many situations adds a sense of urgency and a knowledge of what's going on, and the dynamic of playing as Lucas, then as Carla and Tyler investigating what Lucas did is very interesting, as you end up following different trails of evidence and having to keep both parties happy. It's an interesting premise that, on the whole, works well. It also manages to be very sinister in a fairly quiet way, which adds a lot to the atmosphere.
When the game starts to drift away from this, its quality starts to suffer. The story becomes more unclear and doesn't manage to explain itself well, and there comes a point where every little thing seems to become a minigame through use of quick time events. This is both a blessing and a curse for the game - it really aids the feeling of interactivity to be physically doing something for every action, but some segments are ridiculous to play through, such as any segment involving having to control Carla's breathing while performing some other task. However, it is experimental, and the end result feels a little like a wii game in the way specific actions are tailored to what happens onscreen.
There are also segments of the plot that seem utterly unrelated to anything else, or only relate because of something that feels tacked on at the end, such as the flashback scenes, which are an exercise in frustration.
The lack of direction is particularly evident in other areas, such as one of the main characters seeming to totally disappear from the plot nonsensically at one point simply to further fulfil the requirements of the overarching, over-complicated plot.
The latter half of Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit feels like you're watching a Spiderman/martial arts hybrid film. Most of the time is spent in cutscenes with occasional requirements to flick the analogue sticks. It's impossible to appreciate the quality of this when forced to concentrate on analogue stick prompts, which just leads to it looking and feeling very tedious, and isn't helped by the story further spiralling out of control.
Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit isn't a bad game, by any means, but it does seem to hugely miscalculate manage to squander a lot of what initially made the game so good, alongside not putting in any real explanation for a plotline that makes little sense. Not terrible, but not great - ultimately a game that could have greatly benefited from some simple finetuning.
