The success of Heavy Rain in 2010 proved that there was an appetite for games matching impressive graphics to an ambitious focus on narrative, even with little else to recommend it. It also made clear to most that there was an ingredient or two missing from really taking advantage of any of that potential. Step forward L.A. Noire, boasting of even more detailed face animations and trying to come up with the right recipe to make the Heavy Rain model work a bit better as a game too.
L.A. Noire’s faces really are impressive. Created based on a large number of cameras pointed at its actors, you can see who they are and exactly what they’re doing, without it going uncanny valley. Main character Cole Phelps, LA police detective in the 1940s, is visibly a performance of the actor Aaron Staton. The details make moments of emotion visible and help them to feel like acting performances that go beyond just the voices. If that was all they were used for, it would be a clear advance, Uncharted 2’s successes taken a step further still.
That is not all that L.A. Noire does with its animations. The game’s marketing went big on watching those faces to tell if people were lying. When Heavy Rain threw in anything more than pantomiming actions, it often felt like a retread of old point-and-clicks. L.A. Noire makes that connection much more explicit than even the investigation bits in that game, having you searching for objects and giving you dialogue puzzles including presenting the key bits of evidence to prove your points. Which, as well as going back to Sam & Max Hit the Road, was familiar from a more recent ingredient: Ace Attorney, by 2011 ten years old but only enjoying UK success as of the DS era. L.A. Noire doesn’t show you the courtroom outcomes for the people you arrest, but the rhythms of its investigations and interrogations are recognisably similar.
When it comes to those set piece interrogations, the animations do a decent job at getting people to look appropriately shifty, even if it has to go a bit overboard on body language at points. Where the game goes wrong there is the inflexibility of the system applied. You have to respond to each statement by agreeing it as truth, applying doubt, or identifying it as a lie and (if right) presenting matching evidence, but the game quickly provides cases where none of those comfortably fit. Something could be provably wrong but the person saying it isn’t lying, just not as informed as you. If someone replies with a broad and non-committal statement, it is true but also worthy of further questioning. The game doesn’t even manage to be internally consistent on how to deal with these contradictions. It takes all the most frustrating bits of Ace Attorney games and makes them a level worse.
The result is that trying to read people’s reactions isn’t fun, because even if you can read them you have to spend more time second-guessing the game’s interface anyway. This is part of a broader problem. L.A. Noire has some nice stories with twists of varying obviousness, but if anything thinking about them puts you at a disadvantage. If you make the obvious link between a blood-filled car and a receipt for a live pig and don’t assume that the blood is human, there isn’t any way to say so. You still have to go step by step through the case on the expected tracks, and you’re just more likely to think of something as a lie when it’s not meant to be.
The compensation for this, which is actually quite effective, is that there are many routes to the correct answer. One wrong choice can turn Phelps into an inappropriately ranting embarrassment, but the conversation will turn to other subjects as if it didn’t happen. Or, failing even that, you can find out the next steps from a different piece of more hidden evidence instead. It lets the goofy off-track moments be funny rather than completely destroying momentum. The briefing at the end of each case will even let you know some of the alternative routes, which is a nice touch. The game wants you to progress through these cases smoothly and episodically.
That smooth progress brings us to added ingredient two: Alan Wake. L.A. Noire references Hollywood a lot and has you having shootouts on abandoned movie sets and interviewing talent with an inflated sense of their importance. Like Alan Wake, though, it is not movies but prestige television which it takes after, with its full screen episode title cards and its mix of neatly resolved cases and threads to be picked up on later. It leads you towards prominent newspapers which show you stories of the city that look like background colour but mostly turn out to be foreshadowing of various late-game storylines. As do the hazy flashbacks to Cole Phelps’ time in the army.
Where Alan Wake took after Twin Peaks, L.A. Noire updates things by very obviously taking after the historical drama of Mad Men. It is similarly a work-focussed procedural in a masculine-dominated industry filled by ambitious men in suits, which takes an unstinting look at the social mores of the past. It even gives its main character a past in the war which threatens to catch up with him and comes to a head at the end, the arc of the first season of Mad Men. Plus Aaron Staton, Ken Cosgrove in Mad Men, is far from the only actor to be directly taken from it. Spotting others in minor parts is one of the game’s most reliable pleasures.
Like Mad Men, L.A. Noire wants to tackle serious subject matter while also making use of the distancing effect of a historical setting for uncomfortable humour. It wants you to be impressed by the fact that it tackles Hollywood sexual exploitation while simultaneously having Phelps’s detective partner comment that they are “about to make it a hat trick of hysterical female witnesses”. It’s a difficult tonal line to tread, and a really ambitious one to try.
Compared to Mad Men, it does very badly at it. Much of this is because a version of Mad Men focused on Ken Cosgrove would not have been a good show, and Cole Phelps is even more milquetoast and aloof. Except when the plot arbitrarily demands it of him, he is affable goodness personified in a way which torpedoes any real chance of deeper emotional exploration. Even before you get into the additional issues caused by his nice guy being a police officer who kills five people by the end of his first call out and only accelerates from there, he can’t really carry the story, which in its own way makes the horrible parts feel closer to Grand Theft Auto juvenalia.
Compared to Heavy Rain, mind you, L.A. Noire is a masterpiece of writing. It thinks quite deeply about all of its other characters, building out even the more stereotypical ones and sometimes giving you brief moments of their lives outside of their interactions with Phelps in an effective way. It’s paced neatly and it uses the constant repetition of moment-to-moment investigation to build up a slowly-intensifying picture of a world where every facade has something else going on behind it.
Holding it up against a TV show is a little unfair, anyway. Mad Men doesn’t ever give you the joy of working out how to prove your intuition about some cover-up right, after all. L.A. Noire may not be the best video game detective story (there is nothing remotely as sparkling as, say, Disco Elysium’s “If you say ‘two days maybe’ it will be etched in her mind forever”), but for all its inspiration outside games it is at least at peace with the idea of being a game. That lines up the final, key combination, which is that at heart it is ultimately Heavy Rain multiplied by The Getaway.
This is less than surprising given how many of the same people made it. Among others, L.A. Noire is the work of many staff moved from The Getaway developer Team Soho to Sydney for the new Team Bondi, similarly overseen by Brendan McNamara. Its even more elongated development came in part from creating historic Los Angeles to a similar level of detail to modern London. Rockstar saw enough in its dark themes, potential for controversy, and open world to fund it when Sony dropped it.
It is neither quite as minimal or quite as forceful in leading the player from place to place as The Getaway, but there is a similar sense that all the detail of a world being somewhat real matters, even when you barely interact with any of it. Not as a Mafia II-style illusion of greater agency, but as a way of giving texture to what you can do. L.A. Noire’s artificiality is always right there on the surface, a more elaborate version of one of its Hollywood sets. You can open doors with gold handles, the game tells you. Likewise the fact that when you look for clues, investigation music plays, and you will know when to stop because the music stops. That kind of cue is not an unheard of thing in games, but calling attention to it is more unusual. It gives a different sense of a world bending to its own genre logic, the product of the same minds as leaning against the wall to heal in The Getaway.
In a game about the decay behind beautiful facades, it’s not so surprising to come face to face with the decay of the games industry once again. When playing Crysis 2, I talked in the abstract about the problems of reliance on ever-greater graphical detail. With L.A. Noire, thanks to the reporting of Andrew McMillan at IGN among others, we can get a lot more specific. The recreation of Los Angeles, its sense of polish in every location, was created by churning through large numbers of people at Team Bondi, made to work in terrible conditions under a terrible boss and not paid their overtime unless they stayed to the bitter end. Brandan McNamara went on to try and fail to create a game called Whore of the Orient. For all its sporadically effective unusual combinations, L.A. Noire turned out deservingly to be even more of a dead end than Heavy Rain.
Top of the charts for week ending 21 May 2011:
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