The Complex (PlayStation 4)
Official GBAtemp Review
Product Information:
- Release Date (NA): March 31, 2020
- Release Date (EU): March 31, 2020
- Publisher: Wales Interactive
- Genres: Interactive Movie
- Also For: Computer, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One
Game Features:
Despite their growing popularity, interactive movies are still widely considered gimmicky experiences. Gimmicks have a bad rap, often dismissed as cheap tricks used to wrangle an audience without offering anything of substance. But a gimmick, deployed wisely and made an integral part of the experience, can become essential to the success of a work. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch used its interactive gimmick to reinforce its themes of futility and oppression by offering plenty of paths for the player to take, but none that offer a happy ending. Hidden Agenda allowed multiple players to argue over what decisions should be made, making your friends a source of conflict for the story while existing outside of it. The Complex, the latest interactive movie offering from publisher Wales Interactive, struggles to find any meaningful reason for its interactivity, seemingly only present as a band-aid to cover for a mediocre film that would struggle to get any attention without this novelty.
Presenting itself as “a film by Paul Raschid,” The Complex is disinterested with engaging with video games as a medium from the get-go. The choices presented to the audience only produce superficial differences, and worst of all, there’s not much of an effort to make your choices at least feel meaningful. Early on, you’re asked to decide who will move a box blocking a desk in your laboratory. The box turns out to be booby trapped, and sets off the events of the game. You’re given the option of choosing any character in the room to handle the sabotaged box, but the same character will always do it regardless of who you choose. On top of that, someone then immediately reveals themselves to be a traitor, and the only other one present is essential to every scene moving forward, so it doesn’t take multiple playthroughs to figure out that the choice you were just asked to make was pointless and would have had the same result regardless of your input. At other points, I found myself being contradicted and my choices blatantly being disregarded. For example, when asked whether I wanted to accept or reject a call, I chose to accept it, only for someone else to reject it before my character could do anything, and then not even mention that she had planned to answer it. The reunification of the branching scenes isn’t seamless either, as a few times in my initial playthrough I heard some lines that seemed to be complete non-sequiturs, only for them to make sense when I made a different decision on a subsequent playthrough.
After seeing every ending The Complex has to offer, I realized only a handful of decisions actually matter. There’s two or three decisions near the end that determine your ending, plus your overall relationship with one character can effect your ending depending on the path you’re going down. Other than that, your decisions only lead to superficial differences, such as someone being slightly ruder or nicer to you, or impacting what clues you find regarding the overall mystery, but since every ending gives you a decent idea of what’s happened, those breadcrumbs are really only intriguing on your first playthrough. I understand that constructing a branching story where every decision is truly impactful would be massively complicated and require an incredible amount of resources, especially when you’re dealing with a live-action game like The Complex. But, if you’re going to plough ahead and tell that story anyway, a better effort should be made to hide the moving parts and give the illusion that anything can happen, even if it will always be a fairly similar story every time. When your first playthrough offers an experience that makes the linearity of the story fairly obvious, it ruins the sense of mystery that comes with these types of games. Plus, between the relatively short runtime (my first playthrough took a little under two hours) and the fact that New Game Plus lets you skip scenes you’ve already seen, The Complex seems to be asking you to take it apart afterwards and confirm that, yes, it really is as unimpressively constructed as it initially felt.
It’s a shame too, because if the game leaned into the SyFy original, B-movie charm it occasionally finds, it would have had more of an identity than it currently does. The lavish production designs make an absurd contrast to the hilariously bad blood effects. Same goes for the impressive acting and the ridiculous things the actors are sometimes asked to do. One scene features a dying woman, quarantined inside a coffin-sized medical tube, rolling her eyes and delivering a sitcom-style “Awkward!” after being forced to witness a moment of sexual tension between the two romantic leads. Another highlight is when our lead decides she can escape the facility she’s trapped inside of through the toilet, leading to her destroying it and finding that, inexplicably, it was sat atop a man-sized crater. The crater is then discovered to be lethally deep when a man is dropped into it and his screams fade into the distance before a muted thump sound is heard, Wile E. Coyote style. These scenes are intentionally funny (I think), but they’re not funny in the way they’re intended to be. They feel forced in by some mandate to make the characters relatable by giving them a sense of humour, or to have some comic relief to stop the tone from becoming too dour. The obvious influence of the hand of the author on the characters, combined with the lack of motivation or consequence for these scenes, is what makes them funny, employing the type of disconnect that launched a thousand B-movie classics.
The same way Supermassive Games’ Until Dawn used its interactive story gimmick to comment on horror movie tropes, The Complex could have found a truly compelling voice if it used its gimmick to do the same for this type of disposable sci-fi film. In fact, there’s an early moment that very nearly does this, but it’s a spark the script never manages to recapture. Finding herself in a situation where she needs to change next to an ex-boyfriend she has unresolved feelings for, your character is given the choice of changing in a private cubicle or changing with him. If you choose to have her change with him, you’re asked if she will sneak a peek at him as he changes, or keep to herself. It’s a funny, relatable moment even removed from any meta commentary on storytelling. But the specific wording of the options, “SNEAK A PEEK AT REES” and “JUST DON’T,” conveys a personality that makes it a lot funnier. The frustration of “JUST DON’T” could be interpreted as your character’s frustration at herself for having the thought, her frustration at being in a story that would exploit her sexuality this way, or the writer’s frustration at having to write a story that features a trite scene of sexual tension like that. The commentary is never made explicit, but given the clichés The Complex peddles in, it could stand to have a little more fun with them.
The Complex looks impressive from the outside. The acting and production values are strong enough to cut together an exciting trailer, the timely premise is sure to catch some eyes and, despite the sketchy track record, interactive movies like this are always intriguing. Once you get into the game, however, it doesn't take long for the faults to reveal themselves. The convincing performances and lush sets can't distract from the ridiculous script and poor special effects, and the decisions don't make much of a difference. For a single playthrough, there's nothing wrong with that. It's a middling sci-fi story, but the occasional silliness and gimmick can keep you hooked for the short running time. Once you dig in past a single playthrough, those problems become insurmountable, and the frustrations and missed opportunities drown out any of the positive qualities.
Verdict
- Great performances
- High-tier production value
- Spotty script
- Choices are unimpactful
