The Shrine

Just finished it myself, and my overall opinion is "not as good as I thought it would be."

<b>Plot/Writing</b> - Decent and intriguing, but with several major flaws. The Purple Clan came out of absolutely nowhere (superintelligent AI constructs? zuh????) and were never adequately explained. The romantic subplot between Carla and Lucas was so laughably tacked on, I could see the pushpin sticking out of my Xbox as it was happening - and oh by the way, at the end of the game is Lucas still, y'know, <i>undead</i>??? The whole "it's getting really cold" thing was also ridiculous...if it's MINUS 71 DEGREES FAHRENHEIT outside, any exposed skin is going to get frostbite in like five seconds - and even though it's that cold, Carla is still able to a) sleep in her underwear and b) get completely naked in an unheated subway station and have sex with a dead guy?

Also, the whole "mysterious things happen that are attributable to an [insert ancient civilization here] ritual" seems kinda cliched - although in its defense, I just did a quick Google search and it turns out that the Mayans were in fact nearly obsessed with ritual sacrifices and bloodletting, and used a two-headed serpent to talk to the spirit world. Also, another Google search revealed that there are some psychics who claim that there are super-psychic children being born, which in the US are called "Indigo Children". I'll be damned.

Still, the plot and writing weren't as good as games with similar plots I've played, such as Eternal Darkness and Deus Ex: Invisible War.

<b>Graphics</b> - Very disappointing. The textures were ugly, the animation was subpar, and the character models weren't that great-looking either. My gold standard for graphics on each system are Resident Evil 4, God of War, and Ninja Gaiden - this game isn't even half as good as any of those, and to be honest, the bad graphics really hurt it. Since IP doesn't have much gameplay to speak of, you'd better be able to be immersed in everything else, and bad graphics do not help at all in that area.

(Not to mention that Carla's breasts disappeared during the sex scene with Lucas in the subway car - they weren't hidden behind her arm or anything, they just weren't there!)

<b>Gameplay/Control</b> - Speaking of which, there's really not all that much gameplay in here. All there really is, is Simon Says and "mash on the triggers", neither of which is all that compelling - in fact, even in normal mode, the Simon Says segments are so easy to do that they feel tacked on in a "here, this is so you don't get completely bored" kind of way. I will admit that the first extended SS sequence, where Lucas runs from the giant mites in the bank, was very cool - but by the time I got to the fifth one just like it and the style and patterns really hadn't changed any, I got rather jaded with the whole thing.

The "mental health" system, had they made it make sense or actually matter at all like in Eternal Darkness, could have been cool, but instead it was just really annoying. Just about everything that happened to Lucas made his mental state worse, and any gains you got were usually immediately wiped out. I made the mistake of taking a second drink from the bottle of alcohol in Lucas' apartment in the beginning of the game, and the unrecoverable 20 points I lost there put me in constant danger of an immediate game over for the rest of the game, and in fact actually did net me a game over several times (don't choose the "no time" option when calling Marcus? Too bad, he's dead, -30, game over. Simply <i>look</i> at Agatha's body after she gets killed? Too bad, -30, game over.)

The two stealth sections, in the air force base with young Lucas, were highly annoying and badly programmed. If you're going to give us a vision cone on a map, fellas, let's make it so that that's the only place the soldiers can see us, okay? 'Cause when you get caught by some guy and you're nowhere near his vision cone and you can't figure out how the hell you got caught, that's pretty shitty.

Camera and control were also pretty bad. There were a number of times where I pushed the stick one way to walk in a certain direction, and when the camera swung around me and I changed the direction I was pushing to reflect the new camera angle, my character kept walking the same way (often into a wall) until I let go of the stick, stopped completely, and *then* pushed in the new direction. That's just bad programming. The fixed camera angles also annoyed me.

And lastly, can we please please PLEASE get a game where your decisions throughout the game actually have some sort of impact on the outcome? I swear, every single game I've played like this - KotOR (II), Invisible War, Jade Empire, and now Indigo Prophecy - has given me a myriad of choices to make all throughout the game, most of which <i>don't matter</i>. For example, I chose to save the kid from drowning in Central Park, right in front of the cop. That should have been a huge decision and should have really affected things, and yet my choice to save him got me nothing but a 20-second extra scene where the cop tells Carla "oh yeah, I saw him save a kid." I keep seeing this over and over, where you get to choose one of your three or so endings with one decision you make right near the end of the game, and it's really starting to bug me. What happened to the good multiple-ending games like Chrono Trigger and Colony Wars: Vengeance?

<b>Sex Scenes</b> - I've already mentioned how dumb I thought the Lucas/Carla scene was, and on my playthrough I didn't get to do either of the other two, which I'm guessing are Lucas/Tiffany and Tyler/Sam, to which I will give a rousing "whatever". Game technology is nowhere near good enough to produce a titillating sex scene yet - hell, most games can't even make a kiss look right.
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Given all the above, it sure sounds like I hated it, doesn't it? Well, that's not true. Sure, the game was flawed in a lot of ways, but it did have some really neat ideas, the conversation mechanic was pretty well implemented, and those split-screen suspense scenes were excellent. I'm actually glad that I bought the game, since sales will hopefully convince the market that games like this are worth taking a shot on, and the more companies that take shots on games like this, the more likely it is that somebody will actually do one right someday.

Heh, that's pretty much what I said in the other thread. 100% agree with everything else said. More or less a shitty game with a lot of potential.

Hehe, glad that you pretty much hit on every nitpick I had with the game, I was waiting for you to post

My biggest issues were really related to the end of the game...how the jump was ever made from the point of his death ----> Powers ----> Purple Clan ----> Necrophillia ruined the flow and impact of the story. Throw in the fact that the Cold thing was never fully explained (especially given the Orange ending) and that what's his name says he sent Carla the email (when clearly the Purple Clan would have been responsible... how the fuck does a bum have the internet?)...the whole thing screams rush/deadline to me.

Unlike you, I didn't mind the sanity system but I do see how flawed it was (really, you had to try to put yourself out of "adventure" mode and into his shoes...but it was too arbitrary and really not a positive inclusion).

Graphics: Dunno, I played the PC, unedited versions. Boobies looked ok to me.

I agree with ya on everything else...from expecting more impact from choices to the dislike of the simon-sez standard of electronic story books. However, when you take the game and look at it from the first 60%, you see a gem and a genre you'd want to play more of - at least I do. Hope devs take notice.

kali o. wrote:Unlike you, I didn't mind the sanity system but I do see how flawed it was (really, you had to try to put yourself out of "adventure" mode and into his shoes...but it was too arbitrary and really not a positive inclusion).

The main problem I had with the sanity system was how it only affected my gameplay in a "I'd better do this so that I don't have something bad happen, get a game over, and have to do the whole section over again" kind of way - as opposed to a "Man, Lucas is wrecked, I need to make him feel better" kind of way. Because the only consequence of the system was gameplay-related, and especially because it was an immediate game over that forced repetition of the same sections over and over again (which is always frustrating), I only thought about the system in a calculated gameplay sense and that was the only reason it affected my play. The arbitrary nature of the system that you mentioned also cheesed me off. Take one drink, +5...take two drinks, -20? Eat some food when you're starving, +5...listen to Tiffany's answering machine, -20? There just weren't enough positive things you could do for Lucas to even come close to counteracting all the negative stuff, and sometimes, to avoid game overs, you had to completely ignore things that as a player I would have liked to explore and as an observer are wildly out of character for anybody in that same situation (i.e. in my game, Lucas entered Agatha's apartment on the night she was killed, walked into the living room, and went right out the window without doing anything about the body on the floor).

Personally, I wish they had implemented a sanity/mental health system similar to that in Eternal Darkness, where the level of sanity actually affected your experience of the game. It would have been much cooler for the screen to slowly go black and white, or the music to get dissonant, or voices to get modulated or have hallucinations or whatever as the characters got more distraught, than for a character to be acting the same way they'd been acting the entire game one minute, and committing suicide the next.

Graphics: Dunno, I played the PC, unedited versions. Boobies looked ok to me.

One of the last angles in the subway car sex scene shows Carla riding Lucas with her arms on his shoulders or thereabouts, and the camera angle set such that her left arm should be obscuring her breasts - however, in that scene her character model is built such that she looks flat-chested behind her arm. Disappearing boobies, man.

I agree with ya on everything else...from expecting more impact from choices to the dislike of the simon-sez standard of electronic story books. However, when you take the game and look at it from the first 60%, you see a gem and a genre you'd want to play more of - at least I do. Hope devs take notice.

As I said, I hope devs take notice too. If devs keep making these types of games and people keep buying them, eventually we'll get a true interactive drama with some actual diverging storylines and some real impact decisions - kind of like if you crossed IP with Guardian Heroes (check out the stage map in <a href="http://db.gamefaqs.com/console/saturn/f ... .txt">this FAQ</a>).

Agent 57 wrote:The main problem I had with the sanity system was how it only affected my gameplay in a "I'd better do this so that I don't have something bad happen, get a game over, and have to do the whole section over again" kind of way - as opposed to a "Man, Lucas is wrecked, I need to make him feel better" kind of way.

I think you had a problem with it because you started off bad. You must have done something that brought him down 20% or so in the beginning and was climbing out of it ever since. We were exploring just fine and getting the occasional downgrade and upgrade in behavior.

Agent 57 wrote:One of the last angles in the subway car sex scene shows Carla riding Lucas with her arms on his shoulders or thereabouts, and the camera angle set such that her left arm should be obscuring her breasts - however, in that scene her character model is built such that she looks flat-chested behind her arm. Disappearing boobies, man.

XBox, man. US version, man. I'm really surprised they even had the sex scenes in the US version. In any case, you weren't missing much. It all looked like a Lara Croft game: a bunch of fucking polygons.

I thought the game got pretty dumb after Lucas avaded the cops using "super cool matrix powers," but it took a turn for the worse once they started explaining the whole "color clan who secretly runs the world and is now trying to control AI through the net and...shit. It's the La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo all over again.

The gameplay I didn't have much of a problem with, other than it was kind of bland. They relied entirely too much on the Simon thing and LR button mashing. Oh, and I almost forgot the obligatory stealth missions.

As for the sex scenes, usually I'd be pretty pissed if I find out a game has been censored in any way, but here's one instance where I think they didn't take enough out. Goddamn, that scene was awkward, especially with my girlfriend watching.

I thought that playing from multiple viewpoints was interesting though. Those scenes where you you have a time limit to accomplish certain things can be really tense. The control could use some tweaking though. I failed a few times because I'd get stuck in walls.

Agent 57 wrote: Personally, I wish they had implemented a sanity/mental health system similar to that in Eternal Darkness, where the level of sanity actually affected your experience of the game. It would have been much cooler for the screen to slowly go black and white, or the music to get dissonant, or voices to get modulated or have hallucinations or whatever as the characters got more distraught, than for a character to be acting the same way they'd been acting the entire game one minute, and committing suicide the next.

That would have been so much better. I didn't even think it served much purpose other than, let's see how so and so is feeling. It was fun to see Tyler drop 90 points after I made him break up with Sam, though.

Agent 57 wrote:Given all the above, it sure sounds like I hated it, doesn't it? Well, that's not true. Sure, the game was flawed in a lot of ways, but it did have some really neat ideas, the conversation mechanic was pretty well implemented, and those split-screen suspense scenes were excellent. I'm actually glad that I bought the game, since sales will hopefully convince the market that games like this are worth taking a shot on, and the more companies that take shots on games like this, the more likely it is that somebody will actually do one right someday.

Same here. I like the direction they're taking. They just need better writing and implementation.