Quiet and introverted, Full Motion Video (FMV) games remained on the sidelines for many years, never completely disappearing. The genre has remained a bit bogged down in its limits, allowing itself to be overcome by productions that have set aside live footage and borrowed elements from point and click, thus embarking on new authorial paths with the various titles of Telltale Games, Dontnod and Quantic Dream . Over the years, the so-called interactive films have continued to propose ideas, updating themselves in acting and directing to chase the quality level of cinema. While playfully limited, some of them still know how to entertain surprisingly, as Black Mirror: Bandersnatch demonstrated last year on Netflix.
Wales Interactive is one of the few software houses still active on this type of experience, developing or publishing titles such as The Bunker, Late Shift, The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker and The Shapeshifting Detective. Developed together with Good Gate Media and Little Jade Productions, The Complex it is the most recent work of this genre, and makes use of an interesting plot and the participation of personalities from the show certainly not anonymous.
The Complex's story was written by Lynn Renee Maxcy (author, among other things, of some episodes of The Handmaid's Tale) and takes us in the not too distant future as Amy Tenant (Michelle Mylett), a doctor involved in humanitarian relief in Vindictive, a fictitious nation (presumably in Southeast Asia) oppressed by a totalitarian regime that used biological weapons against its own dissident citizens. After a short and tragic prologue, the story moves five after years to London, where Amy is carrying out research on nanocells capable of miraculous healing effects. His presentation to investors, however, is interrupted by worrying news: an intern of his team had a violent collapse while on the subway. Amy will then have to analyze the girl in the laboratory of the Impenetrable Research Complex of Nathalie Kensington (Kate Dickie), but she ends up being a prisoner inside it along with her old flame, Dr. Reese Wakefield (Al Weaver).
During the movie we will be called to make decisions that will change the following scenes and they will affect both our with the characters involved and a system of personality statistics: honesty, courage, curiosity, intelligence and sensitivity. The sum of these parameters can influence the final among eight of those available.
The performances of the actors are certainly satisfactory, and it is easy to see the difference with the average of this type of productions. Sadly it is the script that seemed to us to creak in several unclear details, and different situations require a good hold of disbelief.
Probably the whole thing would have been better narrated had it not been put at the service of an uninspired tree of choices. The film fails to create a true moral dilemma in the viewer, who will be led to choose the "right path" without too many thoughts, rather than cynical alternatives that are not very solid. Only in the final stages did we find ourselves undecided on how to proceed. And there is already a heavy flaw in this: multiple choice narratives of this type should repeatedly test the convictions of the viewer, who will then be curious to return to see the various alternatives out of sincere curiosity, without feeling guilty.
The aspect of The Complex that disappointed us the most, however, is that many of the choices that can be made throughout the story don't really change the ending. There are some choices that at the moment seem to divert the plot onto a totally different and new track, but which in reality are not very influential, automatically rearranging themselves on the main course. The Complex can actually end in different ways, but only after necessarily going through the same main moments. We have unlocked all the available endings, and we would like to say that of the eight announced endings only about half are really different, the rest are not too dissimilar variants. In several, too many cases, we have also noticed that our choices triggered different scenes, but with the same result. In some cases even inconclusive.
However, it is a fairly interesting story that will keep you busy for about an hour and a half for a complete overview. Those less familiar with the English language will be happy to know that Spanish subtitles are present, even if we were sorry to see the amateur quality. We could also notice a certain “jerkiness” of video of some scenes.
Once the first viewing is over, you can start over and make different choices. To speed up the process, a welcome function has been included that allows us to skip the scenes already seen (which will not work if you unlock a new one). There is also an option that allows you to pause automatically when you need to make a decision; perfect option for the undecided and especially for those who play in streaming, who in this way have time to engage their users.
The Complex is clearly more of a movie than a video game, and as such it has inherent limitations. Its price of € 12,99 is all in all reasonable for an experience that can entertain you for a few hours to find all the variants of the route and all the available endings (perhaps to conquer an easy Platinum on PS4), but that does not put in second floor is the scarce variability of its tree of choices, which will not make you feel that you are changing the story in progress in an incisive way. The confrontation with Bandersnatch is unfortunately inevitable, and from that point of view unfortunately there is no challenge.
