Review for Alfred Hitchcock – Vertigo
What's in a name? When it comes to Alfred Hitchcock – Vertigo, quite a lot. Without the reference to the famous director and one of his greatest films in its title, this offering from developer Pendulo Studios would have at least made for an enjoyable few hours with its wild turns of events, despite being a little rough around the edges. Whilst that is still true regardless, the added weight of its namesake masterpiece and the iconic filmmaker behind it only serves to make some of the game's bumpier moments look worse in comparison.
It’s important to know that the story doesn't follow that of the film Vertigo at all. Instead we follow the plight of one Ed Miller, who at the beginning of the game wakes up after supposedly crashing his car off a cliff, which he claims had a woman named Faye and his baby daughter inside. But after being stopped from plunging off the bridge in a dramatic suicide attempt, it's soon revealed that Ed's story might not be completely true. In fact, no one can find any record of any bodies in the wreckage – or even that Ed ever had a daughter. Beginning to doubt his own version of reality, Ed soon loses the plot entirely, to put it mildly, finding it difficult to even get out of bed or stand up straight without fainting. (That's vertigo for you!) Dr Lomas, a psychologist, is called in to try to help Ed get to the bottom of what's going on. Meanwhile, Officer Reyes is investigating a local murder, and has his suspicions that Ed might have had something to do with it. Throughout the game you'll play as all three to work out what really happened.
You'll do this by moving each character through the 3D environments (you can use keyboard and mouse but the game says that using a controller is the way it is meant be played), choosing dialogue options and even taking part in Quick Time Events to pick up a bottle of wine or take part in a complicated secret handshake, for example. Unfortunately, it feels like both elements have been implemented purely because that's what these kind of modern adventure games tend to have rather than to enhance the gameplay. There's no jeopardy in any QTE because the majority of them are just simple actions which could easily have been completed with the click of a button – fail it and you'll just have to do it again, rather than, say, something bad happening to your character. And whilst the different answers available in conversation will change the response you get from whoever you're talking to, these feel like a bit of a wasted opportunity, as they won't alter the story at all – which doesn't have any branching pathways – or ultimately affect the ending of the game, as there's only one. Most of these options are timed too, which seems a little strange given that they are of no real consequence.
There aren't really any puzzles in the game, except for finding and collecting obvious items needed to progress a certain objective. As Dr Lomas, though, there will be several instances in which you'll need to hypnotise Ed to delve deeper into his memories. This is done through quite an interesting mechanic some might recognise from Cyberpunk 2077. Using the shoulder controller buttons to move along a timeline, you'll scrub through a scene of one of Ed's memories once played through initially, stopping at certain key points to target a particular object to ask Ed more about, and maybe unlock what he's hiding deep inside his subconscious. Whilst this helps break up some of the longer non-interactive scenes and is a clever way of gamifying psychology, it might have been helpful to include some way of skipping having to rewatch the scene again before being able to scrub through it. It's still a welcome addition, just a little clunky.
What also adds a lot of additional time-padding to Vertigo is the sheer number of loading screens involved. I'm not one normally to really mention if there are a few pauses here and there in games where new locations need to load up, but the number of times I had to wait a few minutes to get to the next scene, only to be met by another loading screen not long after a brief bit of gameplay, was enough to nearly want to make me go all Norman Bates on my computer. More than anything, for a game that thrives on suspenseful twists and turns, having so many pauses and breaks shatters any tense build-up or shock reveal that might have been coming.
There are several locations to explore, from a sprawling, sun-dappled farmhouse to Ed's luxury apartment (he's made quite a name for himself as a famous writer). On the whole they look beautiful and there's lots of detail packed into each area. Rather than just things you need to pick up to further the storyline, there's also plenty of other objects to interact with that are there just to make the world feel a bit more lived in. The characters have more of a graphic novel-style look about them, reminiscent of Telltale's The Walking Dead, which doesn't detract from the serious storyline, but the somewhat dead facial animations and misaligned lip-syncing can make it harder to invest in the characters and what's going on.
Pendulo have said that along with being inspired by some of the themes of Hitchcock's Vertigo, they were also inspired by the man himself and his many famous camerawork techniques, including his iconic zoom using a dolly (camera on wheels). To that end, there are several camera shots here that attempt to emulate the director’s visual style. It's an admirable idea to try to capture some of the essence of everyone's favourite portly balding auteur, but simply adding a random zoom or cutaway isn't enough to be anywhere near what Hitchcock created. Every shot in the master of suspense's films had a reason behind it – to create a certain kind of emotion for the viewer. In the game I could rarely find such meaning, except perhaps unintended ones on several occasions, possibly to avoid having to create more animation work than necessary. One scene where the camera rigidly focuses on a cat rather than Ed helping carry a woman to a sofa elsewhere in the room particularly sticks in my mind as it seemed very out of place, and the only emotion it managed to create was confusion. For all the designers’ enthusiasm, the end result feels more like a film school student reconstructing a master's work shot for shot, but forgetting to imbue it with much of the feeling and thought needed to make it a true piece of cinema.
Despite these issues, there's a genuinely thrilling and surprising storyline to uncover in Vertigo, full of absurd yet highly entertaining and shocking moments. Whilst a little slow to build, the pace soon picks up significantly, throwing in red herrings aplenty. We follow flashbacks into Ed's childhood and how he supposedly met the mysteriously disappearing Faye from his car crash, as well as piece together with Officer Reyes just what happened on the day a local man was murdered. The writing itself is not the game's strong suit, with many lines sounding a little artificial and weird, but it almost doesn't matter by the second half, when you're too hooked on the mystery to care. Every character is fully voiced and performed with – appropriately for such an ostentatious game – much melodrama, which injects even more joyful absurdity into the game's spectacular moments. There's also a strong soundtrack, with the recurring orchestral theme contributing a further cinematic touch to the game and a touch of class too.
The game clocks in at roughly 10-12 hours, and by the end you'll certainly have gone on a roller-coaster of emotions, albeit one that doesn’t end on a high. Let's just say it's unlikely that the final scene, whilst definitely hilarious, would be up for any of the same awards for which Hitchcock was recognised. And there lies part of the unmistakable issue with this game: why have the name at all if it's only going to draw negative comparisons with its supposed source material? It's clear the team have a lot of love for both director and his films – it's there in the little in-jokes fans will spot, and even a very brief digital cameo from Hitch himself, which is sure to bring a smile to the face. But without any semblance of plot or characters from the director's oeuvre, it seems we're left with a game that purports to be merely inspired by the themes of the James Stewart classic – namely obsession, the nature of reality and the search for truth, and even then only loosely so. There just isn’t enough connection for the game to bear the name of one of the greatest directors and films of all time.
Alfred Hitchcock coined the term "MacGuffin" to mean “an object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself." Ever a man for a plot twist, he'd perhaps delight at the idea that in this game his own name and life's work is the MacGuffin; relatively pointless to the experience overall, but nevertheless something the game tries to point to at every opportunity. Ultimately Alfred Hitchcock – Vertigo is not a game for fans of the film, or even the director himself, but something to be taken largely on its own terms. Both the presentation and script have some noticeable rough edges, and the gameplay elements are fairly lightweight, but there is definitely an interesting game here, and a fair bit of fun to be had from unravelling its bonkers storyline. It's just a shame that, much like the titular film's protagonist, the game struggles to push itself any higher than that.
