11.29.11It’s been a couple months since I finished playing through LA Noire, but as I dig it out of the pile and take it over to Ty that he may undermine his productivity for a change, I find myself thinking back on it with real fondness and no particular desire to return. There aren’t a lot of things that inspire this kind in instant nostalgia in me.
Team Bondi and Rockstar Games' admirable LA Noire
It was my first Rockstar game. I am assured by those who know better that it shares the particular hallmark of Rockstar games: bad driving. I can see how in something like Grand Theft Auto, where mayhem is the joy of the game, that would be a lot of fun. LA Noire puts me on the other side of the law — not a criminal, but the policeman holding back chaos. My first thought when I had to pull up my map and plan how to drive from one location to the next was that planning routes is pretty much exactly my experience of being in LA. I realized that I was suffering a kind of failure of translation when I was off to investigate a crime scene and found myself in a line of cars at a red light, waiting to make a left hand turn. Eventually, I gave in to the mechanics of the game and zoomed everywhere with my siren on, blasting down the wrong side of the road or through back yards or train tunnels. It cost some of the verisimilitude, but it was more fun. (Ian Tregillis of Bitter Seeds fame apparently went so far as to “borrow” the fire truck during one of the arson cases.)
Eventually, I gave up the driving, making my partner take the wheel and reducing the time it took to complete a case by an easy forty-five minutes (and also avoiding untold property damage).
The game itself was an odd mix. Driving, as I said, but also a kind of search-and-find walkthrough of crime scenes, a lot of shooting and fighting action scenes, and the interrogation mini-games in which I was called upon to read the body language of the suspects. I’ve never played a game like that, and all in all, I thought it worked more often than it failed. The designers did, I thought, an admirable job of finding new combinations of these things to keep the play from feeling too repetitive.
Which is also how I felt about the story. The story plays through four rough arcs — patrolman, homicide, vice, and arson — with an overarching plot given mostly in cutscenes that the detective I played wasn’t privy to. I don’t suppose that kind of dramatic irony is new to console games, but it was pretty effective, if only in that it kept promising that everything would eventually come together. And it more or less did. More or less.
In his forward to the really quite lovely anthology The Best American Noir of the Century, Otto Penzler persuasively argues that noir and hard-boiled detective stories are actually different — and even mutually exclusive — subgenres of mystery. The hardboiled detective is a kind of knight (I’m borrowing from Chandler by way of Penzler here) who “can walk the mean streets without beng mean himself.” A hardboiled detective remains an honorable man in dishonorable times and circumstances. Noir, on the other hand, is about the frailty, moral compromise, and eventual destruction of the protagonist. To draw a comparison, hard-boiled detective stories are a revamp of epic fantasy in which evil has put the land out of balance, and a pure and rightful king must return to the throne to make the world right again. Noir, by that analogy, is a form of horror in which the universe is malignant by nature and degrades and destroys the protagonist.
Through that lens, I have to call LA Noire successful. The designers built the arc of the character of Cole Phelps in classic noir style. He comes in looking like the knight — the true and righteous man in a corrupt world — and then through the game, he’s taken apart bit by bit, until he becomes something pathetic and destroyed. Oddly, I find that kind of tragedy cathartic.
Was it perfect? No. The homicide arc in particular — while a decent self-contained story — fit awkwardly into the overall plot. I wanted the cases to give me more of Phelps along with the cases, so that when his character made his mistakes, I understood and sympathized with them more. I haven’t seen another game that tried what LA Noire tried though, and going first is always a challenge. If there are more games with this novelistic or cinematic bent — and I hope there are — LA Noire will, I think, be one of the games to study, both in what it needed to improve and in how it succeeded.
(NOTE: If you’ve come to this entry directly and it’s November 29th or 30th, 2011, you might should just check out the Last Days post too.)
So … _Brick_.
Still noir, or is it hard-boiled?
Totally hard boiled. You want noir, try The Grifters.
Yeah, the JGL character in Brick is definitely a white knight.
Interesting review, if only because what I’ve heard about the game so far was pretty mixed, from the “It’s rather good” (this very piece) to the “It’s really bad” (this article (http://www.richardcobbett.com/journal/the-shadows-of-la-noire/) by the always interesting Richard Cobbett). It sure seem to be divisive – I guess it will keep me on my toes when I’ll try it out myself!
Also, big fan of yours since I laid my hands on the first Long Price omnibus last year and A Shadow In Summer blew me away, read all of your books since, except the Black Sun’s Daughter series since it isn’t available in Europe yet. But I hear it’s coming our way soon…
I can respect Cobett’s beef with the game, even where I disagree with him. I think drawing the distinction between noir and hard-boiled helps. I actually thought it was kind of interesting to be going through case after case convicting the wrong men, knowing that I was convicting the wrong men, and doing it anyway. It was uncomfortable for me in just thew way I think noir should be. And I disagree with his take on Phelps. His gift bag of Chinatown, LA Confidential, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? sounds like a great evening, though.
I hated the driving so much that I eventually started to deliberately fail any mission that involved tailing a suspect as quickly as possible. Three strikes and you get to skip the painful driving? Why, yes, I would like to turn on the siren so they know we’re following them!
That aside, I enjoyed playing through L.A. Noire quite a bit. It is one of those rare games I have finished.
The only other game I’ve played that comes anywhere close to this, as you say, novelistic or cinematic bent, was Heavy Rain. The gameplay is almost entirely quick time events and doesn’t offer nearly the variety of L.A. Noire, but the upside is way less driving. I don’t think Heavy Rain is as good, but it was also fun. It’s also the only game I’ve played where I’ve taken the time to replay portions and unlock some of the alternate endings just to see what else could have happened. If I knew anyone with a Move, I’d knock some of the dust off it and see how it played with that.
Actually the other game that seemed to really be pushing for a novelistic scope and feel (albeit in a very different genre) was Dragon Age: Origins. *That* was a first class game.
Dragon Age II, wow, not so much.
You’re getting quite close to naming every game I’ve finished in the last two years.
I keep hearing that. While I loved playing DA:O, I didn’t feel nearly as invested in the story as everyone else seems to have been. It was certainly well above average.
What got me in the Dragon Age games wasn’t always the BIG STORY but some of the little things that happen. Like what happens to Hawke’s mother, or the orphanage you help that blind Templar with in DA:O. Leilana’s Song, too, though she was always my girl…
I felt absolutely no connection to anything in Hawke’s life in DA2. That’s partly why I found the game tedious. When her brother died, I just shrugged. I found her quest to get money to buy her mom a house pretty much the stupidest game plot device I’d ever been forced to play through. I pretty much wanted everyone in that game that wasn’t me or the dwarf to die.
Really interesting analysis of the game. I’ve only watched it being played, took part in a few interrogations, and screwed up the driving. I had a sense the driving would make me nuts, but knowing you can skip much of it makes it more interesting. I’m really intrigued by your separation of Noir and Hard Boiled. That is really cool
Yeah, the distinction made perfect sense once Penzler said it, but it hadn’t occurred to me before.
Agreed, that’s a great way to state the distinction. For my money, the best noir was written by Cornell Woolrich,a writer so dark his biography was called First You Dream, Then You Die. And, tragically, it seems his real life lived up to that title…banal and “everyday” noir, but noir nonetheless.
I linked to this essay on Walter’s blog when he discussed the game, but it deserves another link:
Press X for Beer Bottle: On L.A. Noire
L.A Noire was my second Rockstar game; my first was Red Dead Redemption. It’s a more conventional game, but it also tells a story with a novelistic scope and feel.
(Another commenter mentioned Heavy Rain, which I think was somewhat less successful in terms of novelistic storytelling, but substantially more innovative as a game.)