I know almost nothing about Alfred Hitchcock. He’s the kind of archetypal director whose work I’ve been exposed to bit by bit without ever actually sitting down to watch one of his films in full. All of which is meant to say that, in the beginning Alfred Hitchcock – Vertigo game, I’m not in a position to judge whether it’s a faithful movie adaptation or discerning all but the most obvious illusions to Hitchcock’s working body (look, those bird!). That’s okay, though, because as it turns out, Vertigo is an origin story based on a collage of Hitchcockian concepts, not a direct adaptation of the 1958 film of the same name.
The Vertigo game follows author Ed Miller as he grapples with a debilitating case of vertigo – a condition that renders him unsteady as the world seems to revolve around him – and cripples his senses. guilty of the deaths of his daughter and her mother, Faye, after their car fell off a bridge into a ravine below. With Ed being bedridden, it’s up to Dr. Julia Lomas, the psychologist. and psychiatrist, and police chief Nick Reyes to unravel the mystery of what really happened, and whether Faye and his daughter even existed. My thoughts on how Vertigo told this story were… complicated.
The game opens with a series of events taking place in quick time, and it doesn’t continue from there. While button mixing can be great for enhancing the effect of already dramatic moments, the Vertigo goes a little further. Actions that don’t make sense, like drinking a glass of water or feeding a cat, can require a lot of input to complete. It’s a similar deal to the ones you’d find in Quantic Dream games, but sometimes it feels like the developers are afraid someone will accuse them of just making a Hitchcock cartoon instead of a Hitchcock cartoon. a video game if they don’t make use of the joystick at every possible opportunity.
Vertigo also contains a lot of unsettling moments that some players might want to avoid altogether. These include initiating multiple suicides, killing a child, and a scene where, to continue the game, you have to drugged another character in order to sexually assault them. Personally, I find betting on these moments quite tasteless. They don’t add anything to the story but instead, a cutscene just can’t do, and the only thing they end up doing is making you feel extremely uncomfortable.
This alone may be enough to put some players off, but if you decide Vertigo is for you, you’ll discover the true heart of the game: Dr. Lomas’ hypnosis sessions. In each of these scenes, Ed recounts a rose-tinted memory from his past before gazing into a hypnosis app on Dr. Lomas’s tablet, at which point we sink into the screen. fog of memory to re-witness events as they really happened.
It’s a fascinating idea, as Ed appears first as his past self, and then as an outsider looking into the present word. Scenes from Ed’s childhood, where his pirate and secret service-themed fantasies are embodied to shield him from the unpleasant realities of his family’s lives, are especially endearing. I also couldn’t get enough purple fog surrounding these scenes. It can be difficult to make an ethereal concept like memory tangible to the player, but the effect really sells it. However, there is no room for uncertainty in this hypnotic equation: in each case, Dr. Lomas prompts Ed to recall what “really” happened to try to find the “Truth”.
This wouldn’t be a problem if Vertigo followed the same route of games as Life is Strange: True Colors and Let me know why, all of which feature characters with superpowers that do the unthinkable. But Dr. Lomas doesn’t have superpowers, she has PhDs in psychology and psychiatry, and the psychology of memory is a lot more complicated than what Vertigo does.
While it may have been reasonable for Hitchcock to take the concept of repressed memories at face value in the 1950s, the idea that our brains contain secret black boxes of pristine information that only a New psychology can be learned from us, preferably controversial. There is also a strong body of evidence to support how authority figures can, knowingly or unknowingly, encourage people to unintentionally creating false memories of events that never happened. The use of hypnosis can make people even more susceptible to cues, and therefore more susceptible to altering their memories to match the leading lines of questions.
The existence of false memories does not rule out the possibility that those memories are unconsciously repressed in and of themselves, but, considering Dr. Lomas’ contribution to the plot is based on understanding supposedly her experiment on the human mind, Vertigo may have done. much more to acknowledge the ambiguity surrounding the scientific understanding of human memory. Again, if Dr. Lomas was written to have superpowers based on memory manipulation, this wouldn’t be a problem. But by labeling its memory description as psychological rather than its own fictional magic system, Vertigo claims to be held to a higher real-world standard that it doesn’t quite meet. Okay.
By labeling its memory description as psychological rather than its own fictional magic system, Vertigo claims to be brought to a higher real-world standard, which it doesn’t quite meet. .
There are dialogue options where Dr. Lomas can interpret or react to what Ed is telling her, but as far as I can understand Vertigo has only a single, linear path leading to a single, fixed endings, so ultimately these choices feel a bit pointless. It is possible that Dr. Lomas may have inadvertently influenced Ed’s perception of events, that he may have actually forgotten certain details, or may have simply been unwilling to discuss the matter publicly. testified about what he had remembered all along, never really considered.
Missing an opportunity for nuance doesn’t make Vertigo a bad game, but it does prevent it from being a better game that fully explores the intricacies of human memory. So Vertigo is perhaps best understood not as a psychological reflection of how memory actually works, but as an artistic metaphor for how revisiting childhood trauma as adults can be. felt like a life changing experience.
And boy Vertigo stepped in. Ed, a successful writer who could (somehow) afford to live anywhere in the world, chose to build his mid-century modern bachelor pad on the bones of a contemporary house. his childhood. You can see the treehouse his parents built for him through the floor-to-ceiling windows in his kitchen. He couldn’t be more clearly defined by, but still, despite his past. Awesome.
Vertigo ultimately concludes that good can come from bad, and bad from good, through the simple fact that we are not our parents. But while Ed is revealed to be a complex and contradictory man forged by his past experiences, Vertigo is incapable of bestowing the same degree of grace on his villain. it. In Dr. Lomas’ words, they were a “psychopath” who had to be terminated from the very beginning.
Like Ed, we also show defining moments in their personal history, but these moments provide little insight into why they became the person they are today, rather than the person they are today. In it, draw them as a checklist for antisocial personality disorder. They lie, steal, manipulate and torture other people and animals to achieve their own ends without any conscious awareness – all we know about them. It is not until the final minutes of the game that Dr. Lomas reveals the truth behind the character in a series of articles, a violation she believes has caused it all to start working. motion.
I’m not going to spoil what this is, but I can’t help but feel this disclosure could have had a greater impact if it had been brought out sooner rather than later. This could allow a villain’s flashback to proceed with a more thoughtful exploration of how trauma can draw some people into a spiral of violence but not others – a parallel that seems to exist. between Ed and his villain to some extent, but not really being tracked through.
As such, the villain-focused installments are essentially just a psychopath simulation. There’s definitely some dark stuff in there and the characters have a real glimmer of life in them, but it’s not quite cohesive – and that’s how I feel about Vertigo as a whole.
