And now for something completely different... The Complex is actually an interactive film! Sort of a "choose your own adventure" kind of story. You play as Dr. Amy Tenent (played by Michelle Mylett, of Letterkenny fame) as she deals with a medical science crisis.
The game opens with Amy saving lives in the war-torn fictional South-East Asian nation of Kindar. Which feels like a stand-in for North Korea. They even refer to the leader of the dictator regime as the Supreme Leader.
Immediately, you're given a choice, and choices matter in this game. You also have a limited time to make your choice. (Although you can turn off the timer in the options if you struggle to make quick decisions.)
Fast-forward 5 years and Amy is now working for a large organization, developing nanocells that will help heal and repair people. But one of the company's interns collapses on a public transit, having a bad reaction to the under-developed nanocells.
Amy is rushed to an underground complex, where she will attempt to save the young intern's life, while also extracting the nanocells from her blood.
But the complex suddenly goes into lockdown, and some mysterious terrorists attempt to break in. Amy needs to figure out what's actually going on and survive the threat from outside - and from within...
Like I said, choices matter in this game. There are 9 different endings and 196 different scenes to discover. And there isn't a way to save your progress and go back to a previous decision. If you make a bad call, you're locked in to the repercussions of that choice until the end of the game. Just like real life.
I played through this game twice. The first playthrough, I almost made it to the end and got a lot of people killed along the way. I did my best to be kind to everyone - if you remember my previous post, I mentioned that I don't like to be cruel in video games. I try to play as altruistic as I can. But apparently, that didn't work too well in this game. I had to be the "tough bitch" sometimes and make some harsh decisions instead of people-pleasing all the time. They gave me a final assessment of "neurotic." Damn, okay.
My second playthrough, I made a slightly different choice early on in the game... and died almost immediately. At least I got an achievement for getting over 50% relationship status with everyone I'd met... which is called the "People Pleaser" achievement. That hurts. ๐
I actually got this game in a bundle with other interactive film games, although I can't remember the names of the others. I'll need to dig through my Steam library and track down some more of these kind of games. I really enjoyed it.
For me personally, video games are basically interactive stories. I want to have an entertaining tale to follow, where I get to influence the way the main character completes the story.
This kind of game is exactly that, except super heavy on the film side of it with minimal interactions. It was fun to sit through once, but on concurrent playthroughs, I found myself spamming the skip button to get to the choices quicker. And some (lengthy) cutscenes were unskippable because they went over important story details. I would love to find all the endings to this game, but I don't think I have the patience to sit through it many more times. Not when I have many more video games that need my attention. ๐
