Culturally speaking, “everybody knows” Hollywood is a weird place. The art and the business of making movies and TV shows is littered with tales of bonkers incidents, unbelievably short sighted decisions, and clashes of egos. Movies and series which put the absurdity on display, showing us how the sausage is made, can be highly entertaining (as evidenced by The Player and The Studio). A newcomer to the genre, Interactive Films has tried to do this in a game format with The Fame Game: Welcome To Hollywood. And they have ended up becoming their own cautionary tale.
The Fame Game puts you in the role of Jonathan, a guy who’s been trying to make it in Hollywood after leaving Ohio. His first day as an extra on a major soap opera takes a turn for the weird when he’s sent to fetch the male lead for a scene and stumbles upon them cheating with another extra. The scenario goes sideways when the leading lady (and the male lead’s girlfriend) demands his firing with you as the replacement. From there, you’re suddenly surrounded by a bevy of beauties who are all demanding your presence both professionally and personally. Across five chapters, you’re expected to not only become a major star, but also the “leading man” in a romance with one of the many women you’re now dealing with on a regular basis.
For a guy who experienced a lot of the early “interactive movies” of the 90s like Phantasmagoria and Ripper, going through The Fame Game is oddly novel to me in general terms of visual quality. The video is crisp and certainly meets broadcast quality levels. The UI elements look clean and easily readable. Probably my biggest complaint purely on the visual side is the inability to turn off subtitles. Making subtitles or captions an option you could turn off would have added a little to the immersion factor.
Audio in The Fame Game is, from a quality perspective, not too bad. There’s no trouble with audio tracks not syncing to the video. Sound effects are minimal, but clear enough. The music kind of feels middling, not particularly evocative and not particularly impressive. The sound work that is present is good enough to get the job done.
In terms of gameplay, The Fame Game is deeply disappointing. It’s not particularly complex. Different choices lead to different outcomes, nothing terribly novel in that regard that we haven’t seen in games like As Dusk Falls. Examination scenes are pretty cut and dried, but there’s never any sense of stakes to it. No feeling of “I shouldn’t snoop” or “she’ll be coming back any minute.” That same lack of stakes extends to the conversation sections, which is a serious mistake in this sort of title. You might ask, “how does that happen?” Sadly, the performances from the cast probably do more to kneecap the player’s sense of immersion and connection than anything. The problem is that the characters are at best uninspiring and at worst actively repellent. They don’t even rise to the level of stereotype, strange as it sounds. “Vague character outlines” is about as much as we get, and only five chapters (each of which is maybe 20 minutes or so in length) is not near enough room to let you build affinity for the characters, much less let them evolve into actual characters.
This leads me to the single biggest issue I had with The Fame Game. From launch to conclusion, there’s a sense that this is the lowest possible effort one could make to technically qualify as an interactive movie. The generally good video quality doesn’t excuse the glaring errors in blocking and shooting. I shouldn’t be seeing the camera operator in a mirror. Granted, it’s something even big name directors have flubbed, but it’s still a noticeable mistake. The overall quality of narrative is completely without any real engagement for the player. Decision maps showing possible outcomes feel almost insulting if we don’t have any connection to the characters or motivation to suffer through the process all over again. Worse, The Fame Game feels like it wants to be going for the hard R-rating, but somehow fails to deliver even vaguely interesting PG-13 cheesecake. It takes time and effort to build up sexual tension, even if you’re not going to go all the way, but what we get here feels far too rushed and completely unearned no matter what the little beating heart icons might say.
Interactive fiction of any sort is not easy. Interactive films are a special sort of challenge. For a long time, I thought Detroit: Become Human would hold a singular place in my personal rankings as the worst writing ever inflicted on a game. Somehow, The Fame Game: Welcome To Hollywood managed to outdo it. It might qualify as a game as far as Steam is concerned, but it barely meets the threshold of tech demo from my perspective. The fact there are other titles like this on Steam should not be considered a compliment, nor an encouragement. One cannot help but feel as though the basic premise isn’t bad, but this particular execution of it is utterly doomed. And there’s no putting a bad game into turnaround once it comes out.
Axel reviewed The Fame Game: Welcome To Hollywood on PC with a provided review copy.
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