Meshing hundreds of live action scenes into a cohesive story of course isn’t easy – especially when players can take the story in a number of directions – but I felt that The Complex did a superb job at hiding the cuts and changes. Nicole O’Neill stars as Kristina, but the way the scenes are edited together too often makes her come across poorly. Perhaps that says more about me than the game, but I look forward to trying a few more times regardless.Ī title such as this lives and dies on the quality of the acting though, and it’s here I feel is ISBC’s weakness it simply isn’t very good. It’s a little frustrating as I purposefully went out of my way to choose opposite options each time, and yet I ended up at the same outcome.
#I SAW BLACK CLOUDS GAME FULL#
There’s a lot of behind the scenes data that we’re simply left to guess at, and as a result across five full play sessions, I’ve gotten precisely one ending – the same one, each time. The official guidance is the try and make choices that reflect one mind-set over another in order to get one of the four possible endings, but a lot of the time I struggled to see how they were different, and the scene that played out afterwards could occasionally be identical looking too. The actual choices I don’t think are presented in a particularly helpful way at times. In theory this is to be used to help inform our decisions, though how these actually affect any of the stats is very vague so it can end up being more of something to look at after making decisions rather than before. Accessible at any time is a stat tracker, letting us know how we’re playing and where Kristina’s relationships stand with one of two characters, as well as her emotional state. When it comes to the dialogue options we’re rarely presented with more than two options at a time, though choices do appear quite frequently. It’ll be interesting to see how many players go down each route down the line, and which ends up being the preferred one. It’s not even just a different coat on the same story either, but two completely different angles that bring something new to the table. They do both converge back to roughly the same place towards the end, but that fact that about half of the two hour runtime can be so different is a testament to the work put in by the team. I actually didn’t realise this until my third play through, and it freshened up the experience tremendously. Probably the most impressive aspect to the story is how, at a certain point early on, the tale diverges into two opposite directions, with each offering up wholly unique scenes and scenarios. Being such a story focused game I won’t dive in to details much further throughout, but be aware that I may mention a couple of vague details should you want to go in blind.
The further we get into ISBC, the further things unravel depending on the choices we make on her behalf. Things soon take a turn for the spooky though, as Kristina begins to have almost supernatural happenings occur around her. Opening at the funeral we meet another friend, Charlotte, and begin to get an idea of their relationship with Emily and each other. We control the destiny of Kristina, returning to her home town after her close friend Emily commits suicide.
#I SAW BLACK CLOUDS GAME FREE#
Please be aware that we will discuss aspects of this during the review, so feel free to skip over reading if that is something you’d rather not deal with.*
*Editors Note: This game, and as such this review, deals with some quite traumatic themes including kidnap and suicide, among others.
Unfortunately I Saw Black Clouds doesn’t hit the mark for me there are just too many little things that add up to ruin what could have been quite an interesting tale. The aforementioned game managed to bring what I loved so much about the narrative adventure genre – the branching story paths, interesting and challenging themes, and a lot of alternate options upon replaying – and did it all with the use of live action, which has traditionally been associated with less than stellar experiences. After Wales Interactive’s excellent The Complex I had high hopes for I Saw Black Clouds.
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