Shame, shame, shame. No
I am not talking about the contents of Point
of View Rob Landeros and Dave Wheeler’s (Tender
Loving Care, The
11th Hour, The
7th Guest) newest interactive movie, but rather about the
frightened rabbit attitude of North American gaming companies towards
purchasing the project for distribution. For an industry that decries
a lack of games geared towards adults, when offered the opportunity
to change their image, they curl up into a fetal position fearing
backlash from the moral majority if they show even a shred of courage.
Some companies won’t even look at the game – adult material, surely
it must be pornographic! Much better that they continue to pimp animated
violence and sexism guised as adult material, but marketed towards
children as action games.

Point of View is
a feature-length, interactive movie. Comprised of many separate video
sequences, the course of the movie is created as it plays. It is not
the future of adventure gaming (though it may be the future of movies)
but it is an alternative. There is no inventory, nor are there any
puzzles to solve. Rather, the movie has been broken into twelve chapters
and at the end of each chapter you are asked a series of questions
based on your personal impressions of what you have just witnessed.
Your choices are eventually responsible for determining the course
that the movie will take. In this way no two viewing experiences are
ever alike. Plus, at the end of every chapter, the viewer has the
opportunity to dig deeper as personal items belonging to the characters
can be studied and the characters themselves will share with you their
opinions about what has so far occurred. If you have ever played a
game called Tender Loving Care, then most of this sounds familiar
and it should since Aftermath Media produced both games.

Point
of View‘s main character is Jane, a beautiful, but reclusive artist
who avoids human contact. She has developed a fatal attraction to
her neighbor, Frank, and has been spying on him and taking his photograph
without his knowledge. From these photographs Jane has created composite,
silk screen drawings of the two of them together (I can understand
the creepiness of this as I was once involved in a similar situation.
Finally, I confronted my stalker head-on. “Pamela Lee,”
I said, “You have to forget this obsession you have with me.”)
Clearly Jane has deep-rooted problems that will unfold as we are drawn
deeper into the story. Along the way we will become intimate with
Mary, Jane’s only friend; the mysterious P., Mary’s “personal
ad lover”; Carol who likes to explore both sides of her sexuality;
Captain Edwards a homicide detective and a suspicious night watchman.
Together, all of their lives will dangerously intertwine until one
of them will emerge as…well, I don’t want to reveal any of the
plot twists, but the catch is that the suspects and the actual villain
will change from game to game depending on your point of view and
your point of view will change depending on who you think may be the
suspect.

Now lest you still think
this all still sounds pretty tame, be forewarned that the game does
venture into the areas of voyeurism, date rape, stalking, eroticism
and obsession. Yet, all of these themes are handled maturely and professionally.
In the version of the game that I played (and I have played through
the DVD version once) there was no nudity at all, one aborted love-making
scene that never progressed very far and very little profanity. In
fact, the language in Point of View pales in comparison to
the Tourette Syndrome outbursts of The
Longest Journey. Each chapter ends with an interactive interlude
during which you are asked a series of provocative questions. Your
input is used to build a personality profile based on your perceptions
of the characters and your own predilections. Your choices then influence
the personalities of the characters and the alternate scene sequences
for the next chapter.

The
interludes are intriguing in their own right as you are offered the
option to have a face-to-face encounter with the participants of the
just concluded chapter. During this time the characters will reveal
their innermost thoughts to you; it is almost as though you are a
psychologist listening to a patient. If that isn’t enough to satisfy
your curiosity, then your voyeuristic tendencies can also be sated
as you are offered the opportunity to snoop about the character’s
personal effects.

The acting is, as it would
need to be for this type of game to succeed, top-notch. Stefanie Von
Pfetten as Jane is convincingly alluring one moment and disturbingly
paranoid the next. Chris Bradford as Frank is a softer version of
Mark Wahlberg. He was the one character I was most able to commiserate
with, but that may be because his male-orientated ‘point of view’
would be closest to mine. Paul Jarret as ‘P’ seems to relish his role
maybe a little too much and Larry Musser as the night watchman is
too convincing as an elderly degenerate. Rounding out the cast are
Christopher Shyer as Detective Edwards, Sarah Rodgers as Mary and
cutie Samantha Crew who in my viewing was a red herring. The music
by Vancouver musicians Payton Rule and Jefreejon is a matter of taste
and what I at first found annoying, gradually became not only soothing,
but would be a welcome addition to my music collection.

If I have a valid
complaint with Point of View, it is that it sometimes does
not seem to go far enough with its storyline. This is still a game,
let loose and have some fun. Many things are hinted at and alluded
to in an attempt to increase the mysteriousness of the characters,
but there is very little in the way of surprises or unexpected revelations.
In fact, whereas the different endings of Tender Loving Care
had an O’Henry feel to them, the ending of Point of View (there
are 3 different endings) seemed almost anticlimactic in comparison
and too easy to predict. Maybe a second playing will alter my conceptions
but I think that maybe the reason the game never veers into the mildly
pornographic or erotic is because the developers already knew that
they had a hot potato on their hands and would have problems finding
distribution.

Point
of View is currently available on DVD and CD and can be purchased
online for only $29.99. Neither version has yet to find a mainstream
distributor in the hypocritical world of gaming. The DVD version can
be played on your regular DVD or your computer DVD and saves are stored
via a 12-character password.

Landeros and Wheeler
are both visionaries who have been attempting for years to redefine
not only the adventure genre, but also gaming in general. While some
of their efforts, such as The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour,
have been meet with critical acclaim, they have yet to achieve mainstream
recognition and most likely still will not with the release of Point
of View. But I do think that years from now, they will be looked
upon as being ahead of their time.

For those of you still
hesitant to try such a product rest assured that playing and enjoying
Point of View does not make you a voyeur or a pervert. I have
played and liked Fairy Tale Adventure and that didn’t make
me a fairy. Okay, bad example, but I also played and liked Stupid
Invaders and that doesn’t make me…oh, just forget it

Final Grade for Point
of View: B

System Requirements:

DVD-Video:
Plays on any DVD player and DVD equipped PC or Macintosh with MPEG-2
decoder or software solution
CD-ROM:
Intel Pentium P90 or better microprocessor
Windows 95 or higher
8MB of RAMDirect X support
SVGA video card with at least 1MB of RAM
2X CD-ROM drive
SoundBlaster-compatible sound card
5MB free hard drive space
Microsoft-compatible mouse
Mac DVD-Video:
DVD equipped Mac with MPEG2 decoder or software solution