REVIEW : She Sees Red – Interactive Movie (PC)
After playing She Sees Red, I’m not convinced that I’ve played anything. It’s an interactive live-action movie, which indicates the player is presented with options as the scenes run.
The purpose of the genre is that the player can influence the course of events and watch what opens, but there’s valuable little to do here. I’ve confronted less than ten options in every playthrough, each one offering only two alternatives, and many events occur regardless of the track I choose. Worse, there can be a lot of viewing between choices sometimes over five minutes which gave me sufficient time to get myself a cup of coffee while I waited for something to do.
It’s not too bad at first, but Red simply states that various runs are necessary to reveal the entire plot, so these intermissions are tedious repetition after the first viewing. To make matters worse, there’s no skip keys or path map to help lead players to the content they haven’t viewed. Maybe these problems wouldn’t have been as serious if the story was good enough to keep me occupied during various runs, but it isn’t this story driven game has no emotion.
Drugs, love interests and mafia-like business take centre stage in She Sees Red, but the plot about a nightclub being infiltrated by a criminal killing everyone in his way is a shadow of what it would be in a film covering the same territory, and most of my negative observations come from Red‘s lack of ambition the content isn’t about storytelling or learning character motivations, but more about who lives and who dies.
The player guides the crook in many of the alternatives, but the results are shown via a second character with a detective’s point of view. As a choice is made, Red makes a time leap to the moment the investigator arrives on the picture and concludes what happened in a particular room. What follows is normally a sequence of view changes between a crook and the policemen. It’s an amusing gimmick to be able to view the long-term consequences of my rash decisions as to the criminal, but it doesn’t make up for the narrative flaws.
Aside from the end of the characters, the centre of She Sees Red as things move is ostensibly on the excitement of revealing the criminal’s trial, but lines are delivered robotically, scenes are built unexpectedly and the story just draws on without anything moving it forward.
While talking more specifics would be ruining things, what I can say is that my first run was frustrating and the consequent replays were even duller. Despite offering various endings, none of them made up for the tedium of relaxing through it. I simply felt nothing for the figures here no hate for the bad guys and no wish to keep the great ones alive, and this apathy is a genuine problem for a title that hinges on its story.
Also worth considering are the dreadful fight scenes. Blood, fists, weaponry and bodies fly in gory fashion. It’s as generic as can be and only confirms my feeling that Red is an uninspired mess that wouldn’t cut it even as a low-budget movie.
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