If you ignore the pointless, overwrought monologue that precedes it, Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy in North America) has perhaps the most gripping opening of any game ever made. Lucas Kane awakens in the restroom of a Manhattan diner, his body having just been used to commit a grisly murder against his will. With a cop seated at the end of the bar, Lucas has mere moments to cover up his crime, clean himself up, and leave without raising suspicion. It’s a tense, potent scene, and you’re almost certain to make mistakes the first time you play through it – forgetting to pay your tab as you leave, taking a cab out of the neighborhood instead of the subway. You’ll then exploit those mistakes moments later as you take control of Carla Valenti and Tyler Miles, the two detectives tasked with investigating the murder.
From that point on, you are both cat and mouse, struggling as Lucas to uncover the truth behind what happened to you, all the while dogging your own steps as the investigators. Around the three of them, New York City begins to shut down as the cold front to end all cold fronts overtakes the globe. This dynamic is positively brilliant, and with tight pacing and solid script, it could easily make for one of the best games of all time. David Cage, sadly, is not capable of delivering either. Somewhere between running petty errands for a Brooklyn-born Fu Manchu and throwing kamehamehas at internet ghosts, the whole thing falls apart.
This was Fahrenheit’s biggest problem back in 2005 – a time when its cinematic, QTE-driven adventure gameplay was novel and its graphics were passable. In spite of its problems, the game earned mass critical acclaim on its ambition alone and gave Cage the leverage he needed to start work on the PS3 flagship title Heavy Rain. A lot has changed in the last decade, and with Fahrenheit now “remastered” in HD for the PC and iOS, many more severe problems come to light. Not every game ages well, and Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered feels painfully archaic on modern hardware. It doesn’t help that this is such a buggy, slipshod “upgrade” either.
Aside from an increased pixel count, all that’s really changed between the original PC version of Indigo Prophecy and this new remaster are the textures. Aspyr Media has essentially redrawn every asset in the game at a higher resolution, and to their credit, the game certainly looks better than it did. The skin textures have a more realistic sheen to them, while clothing is detailed to the point where you can guess its thread count. Background objects are a bit more hit and miss, as Aspyr seems to have only bothered making an effort for plot-important items. Even those don’t always fare well – the neck of Lucas’ guitar has become inexplicably warped in the jump to HD, and there’s a painfully obvious stretched texture underneath the right eye of his homeless character model. I can forgive messing up the UV map on a prop, but incorrectly mapping the surface of your main character’s face is absolutely unacceptable. How a critical path error like this made it through QA is beyond me.
Like many other remasters, Fahrenheit has a feature that allows you to seamlessly switch between the new and original textures at the press of a button – this feature does not actually work as advertised. When you press F9, Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered jumps to your desktop and opens an entirely new window using the other texture pack. When you press F9 again to switch back, the game loads another window on top of that. Not only is this process jarring, it represents some of the least efficient coding that I’ve ever seen in a game. On less powerful machines, it could cause a full crash. That’s far from the only problem the game has with windows, either. When you first launch it, there’s a good chance all you’ll see is a black screen – the result of the game trying to run its 240p language select screen on a 1080p monitor. In order to make it work, you have to manually edit the configuration .ini file and deactivate fullscreen, then reactivate from the main menu. I honestly wonder if this remaster went through QA at all.
If you have the patience to work around these problems and you can put up with broken graphics in a product made with the sole purpose of improving the original game’s graphics, then you’ll find Fahrenheit to be almost exactly as you remember it, warts and all. The story hits some real high notes, especially in the first act, and early on it’s very effective in creating the illusion of choice. Does your Lucas dive into a frozen lake to rescue a drowning child, or run away because the cop from the diner is about to spot him? Does Carla take a hard or softball approach to interrogating witnesses? As the game progresses these decisions prove to have little actual impact on the outcome of the plot, but they do affect each character’s mental state.
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