While it may have been reasonable for Hitchcock to take the concept of repressed memories at face value in the 1950’s, the idea that our brains contain secret black boxes of pristine information that only a psychologist can draw out of us is, at best, controversial. When imagining the audience naked goes too far. Lomas doesn’t have superpowers, she has PhDs in psychology and psychiatry, and the psychology of memory is a lot more complicated than Vertigo makes it seem. This wouldn’t be a problem if Vertigo went down the same route of games like Life is Strange: True Colors and Tell Me Why, all of which feature characters with superpowers doing impossible things. Lomas pushes Ed to remember what “really” happened to try and find "The Truth". There’s no room for uncertainty in this hypnotic equation, though: in each instance, Dr. It can be difficult to make a concept as ethereal as memory seem tangible to a player, but this effect really sells it. I also can’t get enough of the purple fog that surrounds these scenes. The scenes from Ed’s childhood, where his pirate and secret agent-themed fantasies are shown to shelter him from the uncomfortable realities of his family’s life, are particularly endearing.
It’s an intriguing idea, as Ed appears first as himself in the past, and then as an outsider looking in from the present. Lomas’ tablet, at which point we’re plunged into the mists of memory to witness events again as they actually happened. During each of these scenes, Ed recounts a rose-tinted memory from his past before staring into a hypnotic app on Dr. This alone may be enough to turn some players off, but if you do decide Vertigo is for you, you’ll discover the real heart of the game: Dr. When I snap my fingers, you'll just see birds EVERYWHERE. They don't add anything to the story that a cutscene couldn’t have done instead, and the only thing they end up accomplishing is to make you feel extremely unpleasant. Personally, I found gamifying these moments to be quite tasteless. These include initiating multiple suicide attempts, murdering a child, and one scene where, to progress the game, you have to drug another character in order to sexually assault them. Vertigo also contains a lot of disturbing moments that some players may wish to avoid entirely.
It's a similar deal to the stuff you find in Quantic Dream's games, but at times it almost feels like the developers were afraid someone would accuse them of having just made an animated Hitchcock spin-off instead of a video game if they didn’t make use of the joysticks at every possible opportunity. Acts of no significance, like drinking a glass of water or feeding your cat, can require multiple inputs to complete. While button mashing can be great for heightening the effect of already dramatic moments, Vertigo takes it a little far. The game opens with a barrage of quick-time events, and it doesn’t let up from there. My thoughts on how Vertigo goes about telling this story are. Julia Lomas, psychologist and psychiatrist, and Sheriff Nick Reyes to unravel the mystery of what really happened, and whether Faye and his daughter even exist. Vertigo the game follows author Ed Miller as he grapples with a debilitating case of vertigo–a condition that leaves him unable to stand as the world appears to spin around him–and paralyzing guilt over the death of his daughter and her mother, Faye, after their car falls off a bridge into a ravine below. That’s okay, though, because as it turns out, Vertigo is an original story based on a collage of Hitchcockian concepts, not a direct adaption of the 1958 film by the same name.
All of that is to say that, upon starting Alfred Hitchcock - Vertigo the game, I was in no position to judge whether it was a faithful adaptation of the film or to recognize all but the most obvious illusions to Hitchcock’s body of work (look, birds!). He’s the kind of archetypal director whose work I’ve been exposed to in bits and pieces without ever actually sitting down to watch one of his films in full. I know almost nothing about Alfred Hitchcock. A psychological adventure game born from a melting pot of Hitchcockian ideas, but its commitment to a scientific exploration of memory doesn't always hold up.