How About That Thing?

In 2006, I was convinced that Quantic Dream could do no wrong. David Cage was a fucking genius, I thought, and while I’d already had interest in game design and computer programming beforehand, it was Indigo Prophecy that really changed my outlook on how you could make an interactive narrative.

Fast forward to 2024, and now, I find myself thinking that Indigo Prophecy might have actually been a fluke. Heavy Rain was a massive disappointment, and Beyond: Two Souls ended up being the tie breaker that convinced me once and for all that maybe Quantic Dream isn’t as brilliant as I originally thought. I still don’t know why I ended up buying a copy of Detroit: Become Human. Even if I never actually got around to playing it, by then, I was pretty much done with all things Quantic Dream. No amount of potential Star Wars can change that opinion, either.

Then the alligations started to surface. Throughout the late 2010s, it seemed like literally every big time game studio was involved in some sort of scandal. Usually having to do with development crunch, or freemium bullshit. Quantic dream, if I remember correctly, found themselves in deep shit for having nude models of certain actresses hidden in the source code of one of their games. Also, I think David Cage may’ve committed a racism, and tried the classic “some of my best friends are black people” defense that, for the record, never works and you should stop trying to make it work.

So yeah, it’s looking more and more like Indigo Prophecy might have been a fluke. And even then, upon retrospect, there were a couple of things wrong with it. But in 2006, I didn’t care. This game fascinated me in ways I wish modern games could these days.

In Indigo Prophecy, you play as this guy.

This is Lucas Kane. He’s just some rando, living his normal everyday rando life. Suddenly, he wakes up in the men’s room of a random diner, a dead body on the bathroom floor, a knife in his hand, and blood all over himself. Mondays, am I right?

Lucas must get away before someone discovers what just took place. And here is where Indigo Prophecy’s style of gameplay comes in.

In the day and age of the PS2 and Xbox, there were two styles of gameplay: linear gameplay, and sandbox gameplay. Linear gameplay was all about a sequence of events, one event happening after the other, with the level only being beatable a certain way. Sandbox gameplay was where there was kind of a plot, but if you just preferred driving around town, mowing down civilians, and becoming a menace to society, then that was totally an option.

Indigo Prophecy’s big claim to fame, as I recall, was introducing the happy medium between the two: elastic gameplay. In Elastic gameplay, the story was linear, but you weren’t limited to just one way of playing things out. 

Case in point: Lucas wakes up, sees what he’s done, and realizes he has to get out of there before someone spots him and puts two and two together. While it’s highly encouraged you rinse the blood off of your hands if you don’t want to get caught, you can do several things in the interim. You can hide the body in a nearby stall, hide the murder weapon, and mop up the blood. Or, you can do none of that, rinse the blood off your hands, and just leave the corpse lying there in plain sight. Or, quite literally, anything in between those options. You can hide the body and the weapon, but do nothing about the blood. Or you can hide the body and mop up the blood, but leave the murder weapon in plain sight. So forth, and so on.

But once you’re out, you have even more options. But be careful, because what you do here could impact the story later on. You can pay your bill, and leave, or you can bail. You can put a tune on the jukebox, you can make a phone call, you can sit at the bar and watch the weather channel for some ominous foreshadowing… And while I don’t recommend it personally, you can even walk up to the off duty cop and ramble like a lunatic. Just get out of there before someone gets up and decides to use the restroom.

Once you’re out, you can use the subway to get out of there. Or you can take the cab.

Do you see what I’m saying?

Once you escape as Lucas, you then get put in the roll of these two.

First up, we have Carla. She’s super serious, and once she’s on a case, she never stops thinking about it. And apparently, that’s a bad thing. Funny to think that over a couple decades later, that’d probably be considered pretty normal in a day and age of internet sleuths.

The other guy is Tyler. He’s a black guy. He likes to play basketball, he has Teddy Pendergrass on vinyl, funky music follows him wherever he goes… You know what? I think I’m starting to see why people might think David Cage might be racist now. Seriously, I’m surprised he didn’t have grape soda in the fridge, and a car with rims on it, the rate this was going.

To be fair, though, you could probably get away with something like this in 2006. Hell, Dave Chappelle was considered a comedy genius around this time, and Drawn Together was a lot of people’s favorite TV show as well. By comparison, the character of Tyler wasn’t nearly as bad.

Now that you’ve helped Lucas Kane basically get away with murder in the short term, NOW you have to investigate the very murder you just tried to cover up with these guys. You can play as Carla, and conduct a thorough examination of the crime scene. Or you can switch over to Tyler at any point, and be completely useless and counterproductive. The choice is all yours.

Indigo Prophecy was full of this sort of interactivity… In the beginning stages. The further you get into the game, the more I started to notice how linear the objectives got. IE, you absolutely HAVE to save Tiffany (Lucas’s ex-girlfriend) from the main villains of the story, you have to go to the millitary base in Lucas’s flashback, etc.

Over time, I’ve noticed people have kinda soured on Indigo Prophecy. Some are your usual social justice types on Twitter who simply hate the game because it’s associated with David Cage. But, while I don’t want to minimize any LEGIT grievances like the previously mentioned nude models in the source code of other Quantic Dream games, people who DON’T have a branch perpetually wedged up their ass have weighed in as well.  The game has been criticized for several things in the modern day, including it’s graphics being below average even by PlayStation2 standards, the dialogue sometimes reflecting the fact it was written by a French guy (IE, they never call it the bathroom, and always refer to it as “the toilets”), etc. Some are more nitpicky than others… But at the same time, I definitely see where they’re coming from.

Really, the big criticism I’ve heard is that the overall story kind of falls apart in the third act. Act 1 and act 2 are very strong and very well told, but then act 3 comes along, and it feels like we missed something. Especially when it comes to the OTHER antagonists of the game.

I’d warn you about spoilers, but screw it. You’ve had a couple of decades to play this game. If you haven’t now, I doubt highly you ever will. But yeah, the next paragraph after the one you’re currently reading is going to be a spoiler. So if you take my recommendation to heart, and don’t want anything spoiled, skip the next paragraph.

The overall antagonist in Indigo Prophecy is a man known simply as The Oracle. The Oracle is a representative of The Orange Clan: an illuminati group who rule the world from the shadows. The Orange Clan are in direct conflict with not only Lucas, who managed to fight off The Oracle’s influence before performing the suicide part of the murder suicide ritual that shows him what he’s looking for, but they’re ALSO in direct contention with The Purple Clan: a group of artificial intelligences who just sort of get dropped on the player in act 3 with no real establishment or fanfare. Seriously, I was really in to this whole thing about illuminati groups, supernatural powers, and its ties to Ancient Mayan society… Then out of nowhere, we introduce robots? That’s… Random. And I get that most of the Millennial generation can be summarized as “lol random”, but this? This was pretty much the point where the plot jumped the shark for me, upon retrospect.

It may not have been perfect, but to me, it had a lot of potential. It felt like a paradigm shift in the direction video games could’ve gone. Instead of generic platformers and what not, gaming was becoming a cinematic experience. And while newer titles would blow Indigo Prophecy out of the water, like Until Dawn, and just about any given Telltale game, Indigo Prophecy was there to lay down the groundwork.

Then, my guess was proven wrong when the PS3 came out, and Call of Duty ended up taking over. Yeah, kind of a bummer there.

I definitely see the flaws nowadays. Hell, I probably saw the flaws back then as well. However, I still got way more mileage out of Indigo Prophecy than most probably did, and I’d highly recommend it. If for no other reason, then just to see how stereotypical a French guy can make a black guy.