Another indie, modest budget FMV game? Inject it into my veins.

Whenever I encounter another choose your own adventure game, be it The Walking Dead, She Sees Red, Late Shift, etc, I always look out for a potential readable message in the totality of the choices. It's good to have a hobby, don't you think?

The Walking Dead season one, for instance, almost justified its false choices as a commentary about how the player isn't the centre of the universe and can be overruled and otherwise ineffectual. That was until it started cosmically shifting pieces on the board for dramatisation purposes - cause and effect be damned. The Complex, to it's credit, remains consistent. A big plus in my FMV enthusiast book. That you can see logical cause and effect is largely what makes replaying interactive films so interesting. You can enjoy the intertextual narratives told over multiple playthroughs and the totality of the choices. The player is god - often a restricted to branching, binary choice-selecting god, but a god nonetheless.

There's always bad blood in laser tag.

The Complex's timeline divergences hinge almost entirely on how you treat characters in the sum of its binary choices. A summary screen neatly digests your character's personality in a nutshell. It's neat, if unambitious in its scope. Most endings are swung by final choices alone. The rest of the choices are mostly relegated to mere narrative colour. Given some largely copy-and-paste endings, you could also safely say it has half the number it boasts. Character relationships fundamentally aren't the most interesting of story splits. Complex is perhaps too simple for its own good.

What it lacks under the hood, it makes up for in its production, premise and story. Its writing and acting credits speak for themselves. VFX elements betray its budget, but it's undeniably striking in its look, and set/wardrobe design. The plot doesn't sparkle, but with many a revelation up its sleeve it entertains. It's a very confident show. It's also fully featured with all the essential FMV settings you could want - skipping scenes is here.

Thank god this is but fiction, right?

It's a truism now to say with its infection premise/imagery it arrived at an eerily apposite time, but it's a rather fantastical story in truth. One of unfurling motives, various gun-toting sides, and sci-fi underground labs rather than full-on virus-that-shall-not-be-named. It's entertaining, if not massively affecting outside a few moments. If one thing truly works, it's the relationship of the two main characters. Adversity forcing them to consider their relationship hits all the right emotional chords. It also highlights the issue with any interactive film. Certain moments, like one that arises for the two towards the end, that arise from specific strings of decisions just feel dramatically right for a film. To not see a dramatically optimal route isn't to gain, but lose something for using an interactive medium. Equally, engineering an alternative moment that's equally impactful to avoid an optimal route is nigh on impossible. Such moments are impactful because of the natural set-up they're given. An alternative leveraging the same set-up would either be too similar or not land.

The Complex's biggest issues are genre ones. FMV games have to perforce play a balancing act between their system complexity and having a budget-friendly, logistically possible shoot. You can always see the flowchart of the branching narrative in your mind's eye because it had to be simple enough that this 200 scene behemoth could be seen through. It robs scenes, endings and branching of significant differences. It's largely not it's fault, but it's undeniable that multiple playthroughs outside of a few standout moments were a letdown for this reason.

If I had a company, I'd splurge the entire budget on the building too.

Complex production forced its branching to be too simple to be more than a moderately enjoyable FMV outing, but enjoyable it remains. Excellent performances and production, as well as an entertaining premise make a recommendation simple.