Its time to try something a little different. Something combining both movie and game aspects, an Interactive Movie. A movie played out by the viewer, making the key choices for the direction of the movie.
The Complex is written by Lynn Renee Maxcy (from the Emmy-award winning writing team of The Handmaid’s Tale) takes the viewer through an intriguing evolving science fiction thriller. The movie is set around when a fictional bio-attack hits London and it focuses on Dr Amy Tenant (Michelle Mylet) and her choices through this attack. Her choices are your choices and leads the direction of how the movie plays out for the viewer.
Just to set the scene without spoiling it any further, Dr Amy Tenant is the creator of a nanotechnology which turns out to be both a power for good and a power for bad use in humanity. In the wake of the attack, she finds herself with 3 other people in a self-contained laboratory. Each choice taken by Amy leads the path down a certain direction, it could lead her to save the world or could she end it? The choice is yours.
There are 9 endings to get which we will not talk about to ruin the movie aspect of this.
Gameplay
The Audience are thrown in at the deep end from the off with complex choices straight away. Options are easy to pick with a multi-choice boxes placed at the bottom of the screen with an impending timer. There are a few settings that we added on to our playthrough, including pausing the scene if the timer expires. Good to see them in there.
As the scenes play through and the choices get made, it feels more and more like a role-playing game. Especially with the relationship tracker on the pause menu showing how your choices effect the other characters. Would love to have seen a more detailed tracker but we were happy it was there to begin with.
We felt it held up in the movie aspects the more we went through it. Gameplay wise, it felt trimmed back in the user interface and could do with a few tweaks to make it feel more interactive. It does feature a skip scene but adding aspects like rewind a scene or skip back would add more depth to it.
Overall
We loved it. It felt more of a movie than a game with every choice adding to the direction that the ending will take. With every choice made, at the end the player is rewarded with a personality score based on five basics of personality (openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness and neuroticism). It creates a good balance and focus with it’s choices pushing it along the way.
It has replay-ability with the multiple endings but as a player sticking to two to three playthroughs is the best way to play this. The quality of acting, especially the lead actress is superb.
Based on its current price point of £9.99, it is the price of an movie just released from the cinema. With its replay-ability compared to that movie it shines in its value for money.
Even with our critique, its value makes it a 5/5. A good stand out piece.
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