Note: The article contains major spoilers for Late Shift.

There is something simultaneously starkly real and hilariously false about classic FMV games. Live-action games came across as tacky not just because of their low production values and hiccups in video playback but also because of the way they integrated footage into the flow of play. Video games are reliant on dynamic reaction to player input, but when all you have is stills and canned footage, there's a hard cap on how dynamic your game can be. Footage of actual people and places was poured into adventure game and shooting gallery moulds that stitched clips together in a way where the seams were both noticeable and ugly. The adventure genre in particular, which became the right-hand man of the FMV style, had characters and objects mismatched with backgrounds, janky transitions between animations, and actors pausing for bizarrely long to allow time for player action. Scenes were often either still and lifeless or contained moving characters who looped around like animatronics on a theme park ride. The FMV industry also had a fondness for the sci-fi and horror genres which demanded the kind of SFX wizardry that the studios behind these titles were often not up to. FMV games were, at best, hilarious camp comedy, and at worst, ill-fated cracks at earnest cinema.

Late Shift is an FMV game you can take seriously, and I know a lot of people would argue that Her Story was as well, but Her Story beamed its footage to the player in a completely different format. It was a database of static shots of a single actor speaking in front of a plain wall. Late Shift, however, is an interactive live-action film, which is what it feels like the golden era of full-motion video was always striving towards. The game has a production budget which amply supports its vision, it exists in an age without loading stutter, and it has its game elements wrap around its filmic content rather than deforming its filmic content to make it fit into a game. That is, it doesn't try to Frankenstein scenes together from footage the way that the adventure games of old did. Instead, it lets its footage play and gives you slim windows in which you decide what the protagonist should do next.

If the goal of FMV was to make it feel like what's on the screen could be unfolding right in front of you, then Late Shift hits where so many games before it missed and this is not just because of budget and video playback. It also boasts a non-fantastical story that captures night time in London in a way where you could believe it was made by people who had spent time in London. Media, especially media that comes from North America, like many video games, can assume that you're so stupid you won't know a game's set in the English capital until you see extended shots of the Buckingham Palace guards and hear treacle-thick East End accents. These classic cultural signifiers are not just patronising; they also fail to capture London in any of its modernity. Late Shift gives a brief glimpse of Tower Bridge, but the brick and mortar of the film are the tube and the average streets and not the tourist hotspots. The footage of the city pops as well as it does because of some high saturation colour grading and an eye for detail in the cinematography that you never saw in classic FMV. The game has a dedicated director of photography, and the regular cuts in the edit make those moments where the film branches to match your choices imperceptible.

To avoid any lingering pauses in the story, the timer on those choices elapses in a couple of seconds. It's the kind of game where you tend to make decisions based on animal instinct rather than with your responsible higher brain, and in this way, Late Shift has you behave in the same way as its frazzled protagonist, Matt. Matt is a university student and night watchman who is sucked into a heist at gunpoint. Local criminals attempt to steal a Maserati from the garage he watches, but with their current driver's hand mangled, all they can do is enlist Matt's help to get them to and from an auction where they hope to steal a priceless rice bowl.

For as much of a visual feast as Late Shift may be, most of its potential rides on this story. This is because if it, like all FMV games, wants to imitate film, that means not just communicating a narrative through live-action footage and editing, but also making sure that narrative is coherent and keeps you invested. Late Shift needs this even more than the FMV games back in the day did because there is a relatively thinner gap between its graphics and computer-rendered graphics of its time. In the golden era of FMV, the genre could dazzle its audience by showing them visually realistic places and events when almost no other games could. But now high detail models and realistic body language are standard, and so FMV games can't get a leg over on other titles in this way anymore. They need to wow their audience by being well-acted, well-shot, well-written films rather than just being films of some kind. That's a tall order because there already other pieces in the medium that rival what we see in TV or cinema, but Late Shift shows a lack of awareness of them.

The game starts with a lecture on how humans are independent actors and how choice shapes who we are, but this is a game that was released in early 2017. There had been eight post-Walking Dead Telltale adventures and six post-Mass Effect Bioware RPGs by that point. The concept of cause-and-effect was one that gamers had already had drilled into them, and they didn't need it explained to them again. Maybe the explanation in Late Shift is there to help prime casual players on story consequences, but if you've played any other game of this stripe, then you also know that it's impossible to have decisions be a theme unto themselves. Decisions are always about something. Lee Everett made choices respective to his surrogate fatherhood and the value of human life, and The Warden made choices respective to the racial and religious turmoil of Ferelden, but most of Matt's deliberations don't broadcast any information about his identity or the world around him; they're pragmatic.

They're tests on whether you pacify the robbers or run from them, or whether you sneak past a receptionist or grill her for information. Where there are choices that meaningfully define the protagonist, they're about whether he's willing to hurt other people to save his skin or sometimes the skin of leading lady May-Ling. They present the "good cop/bad cop" dichotomy that a lot of games picked up and ran with during the adolescence of moral choice systems. There's nothing wrong with using forks in the narrative road to impart tension rather than to comment on characters and cultures. However, if that is your plan, you shouldn't open pretending that your game is here to make bold, thematic statements, and for any supposedly pragmatic choices you do include, the player should be able to figure out the correct course of action just by tumbling them around in their head.

One of the first things that the game does is teach you that outcomes of choices are unpredictable. It does this in a scene where Matt is running for a train and is stopped by a tourist looking for a tube station. You have the option to either push ahead or help the man, but it's helping him that lets you catch the train. And the game gives you various other "A or B" scenes in which your actions don't turn out in the way you'd think they would. E.g. Giving a stranger the car keys to a customer's Maserati is the objectively correct option and running from a man threatening you with a pistol doesn't get you shot. It's down to luck whether you find the switches that avoid bloodshed in the plot, and it's so annoying that when hovering over these switches, the game pretends it's logical with you.

In its illogical little chirps, it also pushes back against the beliefs of its main character. Matt starts as an ardent student of game theory, believing that the cold scalpel of probability can cut through any problem, but early on he encounters at least one problem it can't cut through. During an auction for the rice bowl the crew are planning to steal, May-Ling keeps bidding for the antique to drive up its value without intending to win it. If you let her continue to bid, Matt becomes anxious about the ever-increasing chance of them ending up with the bowl, but May-Ling's gut instinct wins out over Matt's sceptical maths. By the end of the game, Matt has either stayed the course with his scepticism and devised a sharp-witted scheme for him and May-Ling to make it out alive, or he's reduced to smashing vases with golf clubs to get what he wants.

If you ignore the bit where the Metropolitan Police are in cahoots with a Chinese crime ring, Matt's downfall from being a cool-headed game theorist to a thief at the end of his fuse is believable; it has a Black Mirror quality to it. And the idea of the solution to the game being to stick to Matt's values of rationalism is a great one, but it is diminished at every turn by the game's puzzles acting irrationally and by it not following through on Matt's supposed eye for probability. The game starts off only selectively showing Matt applying his eye for mathematics, and the couple of times he uses it, he could be pulling numbers out of thin air for all we know. Matt is never depicted relying on his head for figures with the loyalty he claims to, and he doesn't so much become disillusioned with it as he does drop it at the first opportunity. That transition is not believable, and once the transition is over, the game dams its stream of surprising revelations; the run-up to the ending is limp and methodical. It's hard to feel like there's more than one complete arc for Matt in here and I strongly suspect that's because, without a way to know which options you're going to take or even how long your play experience is going to be, the game can't lay the tracks for one.

You can replay the game, and you're encouraged to, not least of which because you can miss out whole scenes in a single playthrough and because there are a whopping seven different endings. However, Late Shift doesn't hold up to repeat viewings. I'm not sure any crime thriller would hold up to multiple back-to-back watches. Fiction like this depends on the tension and mystery created by not knowing what's coming next, but one of the reasons to replay the game is that you can get something close to your dream ending when you have foreknowledge of the plot. And if that foreknowledge doesn't spoil it for you, desensitisation to the uncomfortable moments will.

The scene in which mobsters torture Matt provides an apt example of this. On your first watch, you fear what they might do to him, ponder what that instrument in the box is, stress over how they'll treat May-Ling, and feel the temptation of giving in to the interrogators. But your second, third, or seventh time through you can rest assured that the harm inflicted on Matt won't be life-altering and that you just need to keep hitting the "Protect" button for them not to hurt May-Ling. The same scene also shows where a "fast-forward" feature could have helped players to no end. It's one of those quality-of-life improvements whose absence is maddening because the developers would barely have had to go out of their way to make it a reality.

I have an educated guess for why Late Shift pushes you to reset as many times as you can. My playthroughs of the game took roughly 90 minutes each, which would have been an acceptable length for a film, but you can digitally purchase films for cheaper than you can purchase Late Shift. This is a £10/$13 product, and so the only way most customers are going to feel they get their money's worth is if they get back in line for another go. The gloss may wear off on rewatches, but it's better than putting down £10 for 90 minutes of middling crime drama. It's likely the price is that steep, to begin with, because of these production values.

I don't want to seem too harsh towards Late Shift. On my first viewing, at least, it was a tense, eye-catching film, but no game is an island, and this game stands for an approach which has done the medium a disservice. Plenty of developers, publishers, critics, and fans have idolised games that are "cinematic" but confuse copying the form of film with transferring over what makes films entertaining or meaningful. Reviews have described games as cinematically-pioneering for featuring director-controlled cameras, pre-scripted content, and true-to-life graphics, but none of these qualities make a film. Good films have tight narrative pacing, fleshed-out characters, an eye for cinematography and editing, and often even a strong command of symbolism. But these qualities have traditionally not been viewed as vital for calling a game "cinematic", nor have games that have incorporated them without a lot of cutscenes and setpieces been as likely to be called "cinematic". Which brings us back to Late Shift, a game that's putting the form of cinema before the craft that makes it worth watching.

This video game, perhaps more than any before it, looks like a film. It not only uses live-action footage, but finds picturesque locations and shows thorough comprehension of how lighting, camera work, and editing fit into a movie. But however much hard work its developers may have put into expressing the visuals of film, there have been other games hard at work, figuring out how to tell stories as touching or entertaining as those in cinema, and developing languages as fluent as those of movie directors. It's been those games, rather than the games which looked the most real, which have held more emotional influence.

So as a choice-driven FMV game in 2017, Late Shift's competition may be, to some degree, other FMV games or graphically-realistic games like Quantum Break and Uncharted 4. However, the competition it needs to be more worried about are the games which worked out how to do choice-based drama like Tales from the Borderlands or Life is Strange. Sadly, it feels like Late Shift was written by someone who just awoke from a coma and missed the last five years of game narratives. Thanks for reading.