Fahrenheit is the original title of this game, the title was changed to Indigo Prophecy for the North American release.
Fahrenheit was released in September 2005 for the PC, XBox, and PS2, developed in France by studio Quantic Dream and designed by David Cage.
This was a very good game, it is essentially an adventure game, set in New York city in January 2009, the game opens in a street cafe on a cold winter night; there, in the bathroom a man named Lucas Kane enters in an altered state of trance and with a knife stabs to death an unsuspecting patron that just happened to be there, after doing this Lucas regains control of himself and realizes what he has done, at this point the player assumes control of Lucas, giving him control to either run away quickly, slipping past noticing or avoiding suspicion.
What is original in all this is that the game opens up putting you on the shoes of someone who has just committed murder on a common place, and has to avoid getting caught. Later the game introduces 2 cops: Carla Valenti and Tyler Milles who are assigned in the investigation of the murder, and gives the player control over them to obtain the clues the player left earlier with Lucas Kane, so in another twist you are controlling both sides of the case: the murderer and his persecutors.
The story has the player switching between those characters, helping Lucas to solve the mystery of why he committed that crime and why he has recurring visions of a strange child, and both Carla and Tyler in collecting clues to capture him.
While the tutorial can be confusing for some, once you enter to the game you will find the controls to be very intuitive, many actions require to be performed by mimicking the motion on your control, dialog has you choosing several answers for the conversation before a time bar expires, depending of the situation this will be quick or slow, failing to answer a question will result sometimes in increasing the questioner's suspicion level.
Instead of a life bar, the game uses a mood indicator, that lowers everytime the character gets a setback or something doesn't go as planned, and goes up whenever he/she does something good for him/her, if the mood bar empties the character will commit suicide.
The game makes extensive use of split cameras, making use in them by alerting the player of an important event or for narrative purposes, the animation quality is very good also, it's obvious that it makes extensive use of motion capture technology.
Action scenes require to perform a certain sequences of pressing buttons to do the scene successfully, the player will get an advice to get ready before entering those sequences, what is good about those is that it uses peripheral vision to guide through them, that is you don't have to miss the action to watch the correct sequence to perform, this helps in maintaining the tension and sharing part of the adrenaline your character probably feels.
Gameplay has the atmosphere of a scifi flick, with a lot of suspense, tension and intrigue, although the plot is engaging and there is great deal of immersion, a little before the end the game starts to feel a little hasty, many characters that you would think would be important to the story disappear completely, and the ending feels a little rushed with a Deus Ex machina and The End legend, and that is something that kind of breaks all the mystery and intrigue that prevailed in the first half of the game.
At any case I would recommend this game since it has a very engaging story and will give you a very good experience, the game can be completed in less than 12 hours meaning you can finish it on a weekend.
Fahrenheit is available in America as Indigo Prophecy, this version has some scenes of sexually explicit content removed, a Director's Cut is said to be available but I have not yet seen it anywhere, and I got the european version. It is available for the PC, Xbox and PS2.
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