Indigo Prophecy

PRE-E3 2005: First Look

The crime of serial killing is usually associated with one perpetrator, but what if there was more than one perpetrator, and the ritualistic killings taking place were happening without the killers being totally aware of what they were doing at the time. Furthermore, the victims are randomly selected – as in the first person the killer sees.

Take it a step further – you have just committed the crime, and it happened while you were sitting in the toilet in a men’s room at a sparsely populated diner. One moment you are taking care of business, the next you are seeing a strange vision with candles, and are compelled to walk through the candles and stab the ‘sacrifice’ awaiting you.

That is the precursor to the haunting supernatural thriller known as Indigo Prophecy, developed by Quantic Dreams and published by Atari on the PC, PlayStation 2 and Xbox platforms. Lucas Kane has just committed the murder, and now players must decide exactly what to do from that moment on.

Atari showed off the title at a Pre-E3 event in San Francisco, and though the look was brief, what was there was an action game that treads new ground in a unique manner.

Indigo Prophecy looks almost cinematic and for good reason. All the animation was motion captured. After killing the restroom patron, Lucas can hide the body, wash off the blood, even scrub the floor. This is an amazing free-form game that does have continuation points in the story, but it enables players to decide what direction they wish to take to get to that point. But even as players are moving in one direction, other events are unfolding and those may be told in a split-screen tableau.  

There are three other playable characters in the game, in addition to Lucas - Detective Carla Valenti, Detective Tyler Miles (Carla’s partner) and Lucas’ brother Marcus. Action sequences are handled with using the controller (on the demonstrated PS2 version) and to pull off some dazzling animations, you have to match indicators on the screen. This could be good news, bad news. The good news lays in the challenge this will bring. The bad news comes at the expense of being so focused on matching the controller motions that you do not get to revel in the action playing out behind it. This is part of the physical interface that runs throughout the game – mimic the motion with the analog stick to actualise it on the game screen. If you fail at a task, such as hanging from the landing rail of a helicopter, you will return to the last save point and get the chance to try again.

The central plot elements involve the police chasing Lucas while trying to uncover what is causing all these strange killings, while Lucas is trying to avoid being caught and trying to uncover what compelled him to commit the murder.

Indigo Prophecy is slated to be released in the fall of 2005 on the PS2, PC and Xbox platforms.