Is this the sort of game that you can review after only one play? Late Shift rides the line between Until Dawn and a theatrical film. Like Until Dawn, the meat of our engagement with the game is making choices, but the game itself is filmed cinematically. So it's a bit like watching Ocean's Eleven, except you're making the decisions instead of Danny Ocean.

The main character, Matt, is a carpark attendant. He's just settling down for his graveyard shift when he hears a sound. Upon investigating, he finds a bleeding man demanding he help him steal a car (not in those words, of course--if I remember right the bleeding man uses a bit more colorful language than that). Turns out he's a part of a crew about to pull off a heist. Unfortunately for Matt, he's suddenly in the thick of things--which is to say, he can either take over for the injured man on the crew, or he can get himself shot. I mean, easy decision, right?

Here's a few stats for you:

1. On my first playthrough I unlocked one of seven endings.
2. I found 9 out of 14 chapters.
3. In the amount of time I spent playing, I made 45 decisions.

I wish I could tell how long my first playthrough was, because it felt incredibly short. Maybe an hour? Maybe not quite an hour? I guess a bit over an hour is possible. Granted, some of the endings may have a bit more meat on their bones, but I'm going to guess that just over an hour will be a fairly average playthrough for most people.

But the depressing thing isn't that a first playthrough took me no more than an hour and 15 minutes--it's that I played an hour and 15 minutes and still saw 2/3 of the game. There are only 5 chapters I haven't seen. And if there are 6 more endings (which, mathematically-speaking, there are) that means that a bunch of those endings happen in the same location. Maybe not all of them. HOPEFULLY not all of them. But even if there are several ending locations, that still means that all of those decisions you're making are bringing you to the same handful of places. And yes, I know that those 45 decisions still change small things, like the way some dialogue plays out or what have you, but ultimately you're being shepherded along rails with a few key branches.

You could say the same thing, I guess, about TellTale games, the aforementioned Until Dawn, or even a game like Life Is Strange, but somehow those games feel meatier. They're longer, and the way dialogue choices mix in with decisions gives at least the illusion of a self-guided experience. Maybe it's a narrative structure issue? A good narrative (ie, the TellTales/Until Dawns/Life is Stranges) can mask the thin skeleton underneath, whereas here it is bubbling just under the surface.

There is something novel about playing a game that looks like a movie. It's a fun distraction for an hour and change. Yet I don't know how eager I'll be to replay this to see a second ending, let alone all of them.