Her Story got a lot of attention—and rightly so—for being a really good game that relies on full motion video. Games that used FMV for more than cutscenes got a bad rap after a slew of terrible games tainted the genre in the early ’90s. It’s not that there weren’t any good FMV games; it’s just that there were so many awful ones.
The second decade of the twenty-first century has seen a mini-renaissance of FMV games. Here’s a brief survey of notable titles, each of which is available on Steam.
Her Story is centered around a series of extracts from police interrogations with an accused killer. You watch the video clips, collect keywords from them, and use the keywords to search a database for more clips. Your goal is to piece together the real story of what went down. When you do, your part in the story.is revealed.
Like Her Story, Contradiction is about a murder investigation, but it plays much differently. It’s more like a traditional adventure game. You decide where the investigator goes and to whom he speaks. As you gather new information, you can use it to pursue new lines of questioning. Ultimately, it’s like a big logic puzzle as you examine pieces of evidence and different statements to find the ones that contradict each other—and then figure out who’s lying.
Press X Not to Die is a gloriously fun interactive zombie B-movie. You’re a direct participant in the madcap action, which you view from a first-person perspective. There’s some quick-time event action, usually involving combat, but most of your interactivity lies in making choices. Your decisions branch the plot into loads of different zany directions, so there’s more replay value here than in most FMV games.
MISSING: An Interactive Thriller - Episode One
In this game, you control the actions of both a kidnapped man and the detective searching for him. It plays pretty much like a standard point’n’click adventure, except the graphics are all filmed. Even when you zoom in on a puzzle and slide tiles around or enter a combination, everything is photographed. There are some QTEs, but it’s mainly traditional puzzle solving set against a plot reminiscent of (the first) SAW.
There’s a lot going on in Cloud Chamber, but it all revolves around a number of video clips and other media from various fictional sources. It’s a lot like an alternate reality game, as it relies on community interaction to solve complicated puzzles and unlock new files. The basic idea is that you’re helping explore a database for information about a murder and a signal from space, and the plot thickens exponentially.
This is perhaps not the best example of the genre, but it’s interesting nonetheless. What we have here is an attempt at a Street Fighter style fighting game, but it plays much more like a series of QTEs in which there’s always more than one correct move. This 2015 release is actually a revamp of a game from 2012 that offered even less variation in the gameplay.
Where will FMV games take us next? Have we witnessed the pinnacle of the genre with (at least the first 4 of) the games listed above? Regardless, I’m pretty sure that we haven’t seen the last FMV game, nor the last good one.
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