Hey everyone, PushingUpRoses here and today I am here to tell you that The Truth is out there.
And so is this X-Files Live Action FMV game. Typically, licensed games like this go awry;
they are often lazy cash grabs with bad story writing, but this game is different;
it has REAL ACTING in REAL LOCATIONS, in fact, it was set and filmed in the
amazingly exotic Seattle, Washington! It comes in this beautiful box, and the CD sleeves were
designed to look like case files; oh good, this game only comes on 7 discs. Convenient.
The game was released for Windows and Mac OS in 1998, then for the playstation in 1999. Before
I go into the game itself, some background; it was developed by Hyperbole studios, who initially
rejected writing an X-Files game, but changed their minds when they started watching the show.
The design document turned out to be an epic tome of 1000 pages, and the script for shooting ended
up being over 750. The game had a budget of 6 million dollars and took 4 years to complete,
and the filming resulted in 6 hours of cutscenes. 6. Hours.
I love the X-Files; it’s a show that satisfies two of my most dominant interests;
the strange and unusual, and murder mystery. 3rd interest being red hair, which I experimented with
all throughout my teens in an attempt to look as beautiful as Dana Scully. The addition of
this game satiates another great love of mine; point and click adventure games, so I was very
eager and excited to finally get this running on my Compaq. Can’t wait to swap out all these CDs!
The game begins with a cutscene showing FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully entering a
large warehouse; they are followed by a bunch of armed men. Scully is shot, then a bright flash
occurs off screen, presumably killing whoever was following the pair. Cut to the FBI Field Office in
Seattle, and you might be wondering - who IS this strange man that looks either like Tom Cruise or
Dana Ashbrook depending on the angle? Surprise, you don’t get to play as Mulder or Scully,
despite them being heavily advertised on the box. David Duchavany and Gillian Anderson
were extremely busy and had to shoot their parts in between their schedule for the show
and the production of the X-Files movie, so instead you get to play as agent Craig Willmore,
created specifically for this game. In an attempt to add some drama and character development,
you find out that Craig is in the middle of a divorce from his wife, which he writes about
in his journal. This comes up every now and then, but for the most part goes nowhere. Willmore: “I
got a letter from Barbra.” Agent Cook: “Anything good?” Willmore: “Not really.” Cook: “Too bad.”
Let’s see here, this is an adventure game… I can click on stuff to take it,
and of course I want to take everything… gotta cool desk, cool computer… Oh, tape!
...What is happening. Really? They filmed a scene
where my character is just putting some scotch tape on his nose and that’s it. Oh and I can
repeat it, gosh! I can tell this game is going to be WILD. Willmore: “Not really.”
You share the building with another Agent, Agent Cook, and your superior,
special Agent Armistead Shanks. He calls us into his office where we get to see a familiar face;
if you are a fan of the X-Files show you will recognize this man as FBI assistant director,
Walter Skinner. Mulder and Scully are missing, and he’s putting us on the case.
Of course I have very important questions: Willmore: “Are they
romantically involved?” Skinner: “I don’t know, I don’t think so.” Willmore: “Have they
been romantically involved in the past.” Skinner: “As I said, I don’t know.” YES THEY ARE, DAMMIT.
I am instructed to file an APB and dump my other cases on Agent Cook.Willmore:
“Will you file an APB on Agents Scully and Mulder for me.” Cook:
“Yes.” Find out if they were romantically involved.
That is your objective; the main story of course is a little more complicated. You end
up finding evidence in the hotel rooms Mulder and Scully were staying at, and that leads you
to a warehouse. The warehouse leads you to a dock where you meet a suspicious character,
the suspicious character gets murdered, his boat leads you to another boat that had radiation burns
on it, and too long, didn’t read; it seems as though there was a smuggling ring involving
Russia bringing plutonium into the country, and that Scully and Mulder could have found themselves
in the wrong place at the wrong time, but it’s not about plutonium! It’s about ALIENS. ALIENS
TAKING OVER PEOPLE’S BODIES AND COVERING THEM IN OIL, which references a lot of the show’s lore.
The story was really your typical X-Files fare and it worked surprisingly well for an adventure game,
but that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about all the cheesy, fun things I came
across while playing this game, like this graffiti on the warehouse wall. EAT THE CORN…RON? Is this
a subliminal message? Hrmmm...The walls have ears… Okay, I’m ready for a corn puzzle, lay it on me. I
was curious to find a kernel of infor-maze-tion on this graffiti and found myself on an
awesome website filled with game facts; Apparently it’s a reference
to a crude remark overheard on set by Gillian Anderson. There’s even a fan site dedicated
to the X-Files called eatthecorn.com. Doesn’t explain who RON is though, hm.
As I was saying, there’s a lot of fun things about this game,
but MY favorite part was annoying everyone with my binoculars.
Crime Lab Guy: “What’s the matter with you?” Look, if you’re going to give me binoculars and
flashlights, I am going to use them to piss people off. Oh and we ALSO get a camera. *click* Skinner:
“What’s the matter with you?” *click* So, let’s move on to- ….Oh. Right, one second.
Let’s talk about the game mechanics; this is a game you cannot play without reading the
instructions - the first hour or so went okay, I had some instruction from Shanks and Skinner,
but I didn’t know there was so much involved until I read the manual that came with the game.
You get a PDA, specifically an Apple Newton, and you need to use this a lot.
More than I thought I had to. To progress, you have to interrogate people, find evidence,
and send the notes you take throughout the game to both Agent Shanks and Agent Skinner,
which took me too long to figure out, and also took me too long to do. At one point I was just
robotically clicking, sending pages worth of notes to people. You also get a computer - there’s one
in your office and in your apartment, and it can be used to access a database for looking up people
using their names, phone numbers, or license plate numbers. You can also check your mail.
“You’ve got mail.” Ooooo, sultry. Say it again, baby. “You’ve got mail.” PUURRRR. The PDA has
a GPS, giving us our map. It’s easy enough to use, just click on a hot spot, and you’re there.
The more you find out about the case, the more spots open up. On top of using these high tech
objects for your notes and contacts, you also need to interrogate everyone you can, and THIS
is one of the best parts of the game. A common issue with adventure games is sometimes dialogue
trees can get a little long winded. That’s not always a bad thing if the writing is compelling,
but there have been many instances where I felt the conversation went on too long;
it either became redundant and I lost interest, or it was so utterly boring I just wanted to
skip through it; however, I noticed this game kept responses and explanations really terse.
Maybe too terse. Willmore: “Do you have any idea what happened?” Photographer: “No.” Oh. Okaaay.
Overall, the live acted parts were edited a lot tighter than other games, there’s not a lot of
dead air, making the conversations flow a little more naturally. Well. Most of the time. Willmore:
“He and Shanks should make babies.” What the hell
is this dialogue. Hotel lady: “What’s the matter with you!?”
The actors are really good, especially since many of them are from the show, including the lone
gunmen, X, and later on, Scully and Mulder. One of my favorite characters is a detective named Mary
Asadaurian; we are introduced at a Murder Scene where we discuss death, smuggling, and fish stock;
what an adorable meet cute. “What’s wrong with you?” You and this character have some sexual
tension while discussing boats, I mean who wouldn’t, and this develops into a romantic
interest. I liked this character dynamic, even though there wasn’t a sex scene. You cannot tease
me with such palpable tension and not reward me with SOMETHING - in fact, she doesn’t even
appear at the end of the game; this character became a big part of the story and the gameplay,
and it’s nice to see this relationship being fostered because it kind of mirrored the close
partnership that Mulder and Scully had, but they dropped Astadaurian so fast.Maybe they just
couldn’t figure out a way to incorporate her into game’s conclusion. Speaking of Mulder and Scully,
since our objective is to find them, you can assume they don’t play the biggest part in the
game. I didn’t mind playing as another character because I thought it’d be harder to immerse myself
in an existing one, I dare say that could have been a little restrictive to the player. Agent
Willmore is not a blank character... though you wouldn’t know it by the expression on his face,
but he’s at least unfamiliar enough so that you can act as a detective,
using the PDA and the crime kit, and hopping from spot to spot as you piece together the story.
A little bit of Mulder can go a long way; a dab will do ya as they say,
so I was pretty happy with his brief appearance. I wasn’t upset I didn’t get to play as him,
or with him, and the same goes for Scully. It made it all the more exciting when I found them.
Some of the static screens were a little awkward; nothing quite like seeing two frames of Skinner’s
twitchy grin loop over and over again, or watching this woman highlight the same part of a book for
30 minutes. But my favorite thing, possibly ever in the entire world, is while I am at the dock
looking at the harbor master, it will randomly cut to a closeup of him taking a sip of his coffee.
He doesn’t say anything, it’s not an indication of something happening,
there’s no point to this at all, the game just really wants me to see this guy
sipping his coffee. You probably also noticed the close up shots of the characters when you
do talk to them - it’s a little off putting just seeing their face take up the entire frame, and
I also got the impression the performers didn’t always know where to look. Sometimes it looks like
they are just staring right through me, they are looking at me without making direct eye contact.
Another thing I do want to praise it for is its LACK of jumpscares. It is so easy to put
something startling in a first person game for a cheap scare, and this game is perfect for that;
large settings, lots of clumsy navigation and an eerie atmosphere
with the threat of aliens and murder, but there really wasn’t anything that caught me
off guard. I was pleasantly surprised. It’s not even a really scary game, in fact the scariest
thing for me was turning around and suddenly seeing my chiseled self in a bathroom mirror.
Unfortunately, this game suffers from a very common 1st person adventure game problem;
the navigation. There is just something inherently flawed about 1st person point
of view in a game like this; it’s so easy to miss things, get confused when you try to turn around,
and this game was full of these large, nearly empty settings that took forever to investigate.
I started to get frustrated when I kept looping around this warehouse looking for clues.
It became exhausting and I really didn’t know where to look, so I did read a guide.
In this warehouse, filled with almost NOTHING of importance, I had to find this bullet in a post,
which can only be seen at a certain angle, and this cigarette. Yes, these two pixels
are a cigarette. If you are going to have a bullet lodged into a pole, maybe don’t have a fucking
million poles? The setting needs to be MUCH smaller for this kind of tedious pixel hunting;
even after reading a walkthrough it still took me a long time to find these small items. Maybe
if these settings were easier to navigate, it would be different, but as it is just egregious.
It gets tiring very quickly, and I am not a fan of sprinkling in just a few items of interest
among a lot of things you can look at. I suppose it can add to the atmosphere, but do I really need
a closeup of this file cabinet or this poster that says BUMBLESHOOT? It’d be different if there was
a small description of all these things I can look up, but there isn’t. You’ll notice that
there are big name brands scattered EVERYWHERE - the creators of the game got permission from
these companies to put their products in the game. You’d think this would add some realism
to the settings, but mostly I was just annoyed I couldn’t pick up this half eaten cruller.
Huh, what’s this. Oh good. Very relevant, let me just add this to my notes. *ding!*
While navigating my surroundings, I noticed I started to misclick a lot, especially in
Willmore’s apartment - every time I went into the hallway to try to get to the bedroom,
EVERY time, I clicked on this damn portrait. Why does Willmore even have this portrait? It depicts
Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, just in case you were dying to know. So yeah, It’s a little easy
to get click happy, which trust me, you don’t want to do that. Misclicking got me fired a few times,
and thrown into a lake another time. The end of the game became a nightmare because I found
myself in a dark building where every room looked the same, I was being chased by aliens,
one who has taken over Mulder, and I only have a little bit of time to figure out the answer.
I don’t know why so many live acted FMV games end in timed action sequences - it’s stressful
and frustrating and all I want is to save Mulder so he and Scully can get romantically involved so
I can stop writing fanfiction, is that so much to ask? Crime Lab Guy: “What’s the matter with you?”
Despite some of these frustrations and quirks, I loved playing through this game.
I finished it in a little over 6 hours, which I separated into 3 hours over two evenings, and
I do not regret any of that time spent. I’m not just saying this because I’m an X-Files fan and
it’s just pandering to my love for the franchise, I think this is a pretty good FMV game on its own
and I can see myself playing it again. It was really true to the show it was adapted from, I
loved talking to all the characters, and I thought the investigation mechanic had a lot of potential.
I think mystery games are a challenge to write because you have to make the player feel like they
are collecting evidence and taking notes, and give them the ability to solve these mysteries while
they are piecing the story together, and I think there are very few games that got this right. Just
to compare, modern FMV game Contradiction has a great mechanic where you interview characters,
collect the notes, then compare them for any hypocrosies or blatant lies.
Contradiction makes it easier to review your notes, versus the X-Files where they are all
crammed into the PDA. We may have missed the window for making another X-Files game,
but I can see myself playing one similar to this with fewer UI problems and a better way to compile
evidence. Could also do without the long as hell live action scenes. I’ve always wanted to watch
two men mess with a trap door for a million years, the excitement is just unbearable.
But I digress, this is a good example of a decent FMV game on a beloved franchise.
It was a commercial success when it was released in 1998,
and by 2013 it had sold about one million units. Like many games from this time period,
it’s difficult to run on modern machines, and it’s not available on any services like steam or GOG,
but I hope it does get a re-release somewhere so it’s easier for people to play. If you happened to
have an original playstation lying around, there was also a version released for that
and of course you can try a virtual machine, and I do think it’s worth it if you want a night
of cheese, murder, and awkward conversation. If you have an FMV game you’d love to see me cover,
please leave a suggestion in the comments; and remember… eat corn.
Hey everyone, thanks again for watching my review of the X-Files game. The Truth it out
there. If you want to see more content from me, I have plenty on offer but first I’d like to give
a shoutout to my patrons, for without them, I might not have had the patience to sit through
those tedious pixel hunting sections. If you wanna donate to my campaign, I would love that because
money helps me buy stuff, but if not, shares and likes also help and are good for morale.
If you wanna see more work from me, check out the videos on screen;
on the left I have a review of an X-Files episode, featuring a murderous freakshow,
and on the right I have an episode from my flagship series That Time on Murder,
She Wrote. Thanks again for watching and as always, I’ll see you in the next one.