Alfred Hitchcock - Vertigo Reviews

If you like movie-like games I highly recommend this one. It's an intriguing unpredictable story that is fun to unravel.

When I read the reviews of the game before buying it, I thought people exaggerated on the slow pace at the beginning. But they were all correct. It is reeeeaaaallllllyyyyy slooooooooooow. Once you get past that, the story gets more dynamic and the cinematic moment less dull. I get that it was done for dramatic effect and make resemble a movie, but god! The story and the game are otherwise quite good, and the game-play is relatively interesting although I don't know how much impact the choices have on the story itself. One last thing: the loading times switching from one story side to the other are particularly long, And I have been running the game with 16Go RAM with a graphic card with 4Go dedicared memory... Beware. Still, you can get through the story in 1 day and for its price now, it is worth checking out for yourselves.

I really can’t give a score to the gameplay, because there’s basically no real gameplay — you just follow the story and press a few buttons, or a combination of buttons, every now and then. But the story is truly amazing.

Pendulo Studios’ Alfred Hitchcock: Vertigo is a fervent experiment in marrying classic suspense with modern interactivity, but the marriage results in an uneven union. The game promises a psychological thrill ride inspired by Hitchcock’s Vertigo - yet quickly diverts into an entirely new narrative that bears only thematic resemblance to the 1958 classic. You step into the fractured mind of writer Ed Miller, surviving a car crash that seemingly claims his wife and daughter - though no evidence of their existence remains. The narrative unfolds through three key perspectives: Ed himself, his cryptic therapist Dr. Lomas and the local sheriff, creating a tense tapestry of unreliability, memory and identity. From a cinematic standpoint, Vertigo shines. Its visual direction emulates Hitchcock’s signature angles and framing, occasionally delivering that spine-tingling sensation of watching a noir thriller in motion. The original score and sound design nod to Bernard Herrmann’s legacy, adding depth and urgency to every scene. Mechanically, however, the game trips over its ambitions. Quick-time events feel stilted and inconsequential, dialogue choices never alter the course of the story and the investigative mechanics are simplistic; rarely requiring more than clicking on obvious hotspots. While the story captivates initially, it falters thanks to awkward animation, poor lip syncing and frequently cringe-inducing dialogue. Ed’s sarcastic tone often feels abrasive rather than charming. Alfred Hitchcock: Vertigo is best approached as a dark, atmospheric interactive novel - less a game, more a moody, twist-driven experience. If you're drawn to psychological mysteries, cinematic pacing and unreliable narration, and don't mind surrendering player agency, it might grip you. But if you crave meaningful choices, polished animation or robust gameplay, you may find this reimagining disappointingly hollow.

This game SERIOUSLY needs warnings for p3dophili@ and m*lestation. They aren't just mentioned, they're major plot points at the end of the game, have a mission centered around them, and come with speech options that are... not very sympathetic to victims. I haven't seen every movie Hitchcock ever made - hey, some of them are tough to find! - but I've seen 36-odd of them and don't recall either subject being referenced or implied. The Good: - Some fun nods to Hitch without going too over the top, mostly in the character models for the main family. - The soundtrack is great! - There's decent variety in the speech options. The Meh: The designers and writers really erred on the side of not being too referential, which results in most of my complaints. (By the end of the movie, the bridge scenes actually reminded me most of the Bacall-Bogart movie "Dark Passage"... directed by Delmer Daves.) There's some small benefits, and some big downsides. - You won't necessarily know every itty bitty twist just from being familiar with Hitchcock's work. - There's also no throw-away quotes. I'm corny and would have liked at least some, but I can see how that could get under someone else's skin. - There's also very limited visual references, and the non-Vertigo references which were made were only to Hitch's most famous flicks (Psycho, The Birds), not to what I'd think of as medium-famous (Rope) or more obscure (Sabotage). Sure, that's a contentious, pretentious, and subjective metric, and they're definitely more tough to reference in the context of this plot and setting, but it was a bit of a let-down. - There's some nice shots in the cut-scenes, referencing Hitchcock classics... but there's also some pretty rough ones. An example which really stood out to me was a shot framing a character in the foreground, reacting to a corpse which dominates the bottom of the frame... and another character's head barely poking over the body with a :/ facial expression. I mean, some shoulders showing would have helped, and maybe just their eyes could have been staged in some cool way, but the head alone actually had me snorting during what should have been an impactful moment. The ugly: - The ability to run comes and goes... and when I was most frustrated, looking for the one object in a scene that I needed to interact with and was missing, I'd inevitably find myself in a scene with no running. - No optional hint system, so if you are stuck circling a room for 5 minutes because you are too stubborn and spoiler-phobic to look up a guide, good luck. There were times I would have killed for a compass pointer... You might be thinking, "Ah yes, the classic complaint of the idiot and the coward: I can't dumb this game down." That's fair enough. But if the point of a game is to have fun, and I'm too stupid to progress because you have to twist the camera around at an actually nauseating angle to find the interaction point, I should be able to opt out of feeling intellectually superior and opt in to having a good time. -Not a lot of "flavor"... some more red-herring item interactions would have been nice. There's many rooms/areas you can enter (at a walk...) that don't have any item interactions, Hitchcock references, or character commentary. By the middle of the game I was sticking as tightly as I could to the rails, achievements be damned, because whatever the reward I was missing for exploring was, the payoff absolutely wouldn't have been worth it. - Not enough quick-time events to feel involved in most of the 'cutscene' portions, just enough random one-off ones that you could never just relax and enjoy the clip. You're not able to 'skip' non-interactable cutscene segments. The Ending: Across the board, it just struck me as strange not to dig deeper into "the archives", especially when you have such a prolific body of work to draw from. I'll give you an example, but only if you promise not to judge me if I'm blanking and forgetting some obvious Hitchcock lore. The motel in the game is named "The Seafairer Motel". Why not just go for it and reference the Hotel Julian? Or the Fairmont, where the IRL crew stayed while filming Vertigo? I get not calling it "the Bates Motel", but you could have given a little nod to Jamaica Inn or something... but then again, maybe I am being a fake fan and forgetting a notable Hitchcock-related motel, lol. I finished this game due to a night of insomnia. TLDR: There's not enough Hitchcock references to feel like it rewards fans, the story wasn't terribly interesting, and the two least-likable characters get the most screentime. (By which I mean the two least-faceted characters, both of whom are beyond petulant.) As mentioned up top, there's also some upsetting content that, to my admittedly limited knowledge, didn't stem from any Hitchcock movies and which frankly neither added anything to the story nor were utilized as horror factors.

Absolutely great story with twists and secrets to uncover :) Yes, it is a simple in terms of actual gameplay, just a walking simulator with some choices that can change some bits and pieces. But I enjoyed it so much! For all fans of Hitchcock's suspense and good detective stories it is a must have! Highly recommend to play it :)