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A
s it swaggered onto
consoles in 2011, LA
Noire did so on a red
carpet laid down by
Tinseltown itself.
This was a game
that wanted to be
a movie star, with
a glamorous cinematic ambition that held
a mirror up to its Hollywood setting. Seven
years in the making, Rockstar’s detective
drama was one of the most expensive games
ever created, with investment enough to
fund a modest movie, and with a cast of 400
actors, every nuance of whose performances
were captured by 32 cameras via the same
MotionScan technology used in Avatar and
Lord Of The Rings. It was as close to a movie
as any videogame had ever come.
The pitch was LA Confidential meets
Grand Theft Auto. ‘Proper’ actors were cast,
many of them stars of Mad Men – most
notably, Aaron Staton playing protagonist
Cole Phelps. Actors’ performances were
integral to the game’s interrogation mechanic:
every one, no matter how small, designed to
be relatable, believable, unbelievable, as only
humans can be. This headline feature relies
on the player being able to tell a liar from, to
paraphrase Christopher Walken’s chilling
mafioso in True Romance, ‘pantomimes’ of
unwitting facial movements and nervous
ticks. In theory, so realistic are the faces in
LA Noire that it should be possible to spot
the difference between a fibbing toerag and
an honest John just by observing the actor’s
performance. In reality, despite all the
expensive MotionScan tech behind it, it was
often impossible to tell a guilty smirk from a
Mona Lisa smile.
The mo-scanned interrogations were its
headline feature, but the crime scene
investigations that form the basis of each
case are the superior element. These
moments of almost plodding police work are
framed in an intelligently designed detective
metagame that doesn’t rely on supernatural
senses or a Bat-cowl, but instead involves
getting your hands dirty with tactile forensic
examination. Phelps is directed around each
crime scene by musical cues, woven into the
soundtrack, to potential clues. Picking up an
item and manipulating it wasn’t entirely
new, but was given greater significance than
simply turning a box the right way up in
order to open it and reveal its contents, as in
the Resident Evil games. The camera zooms
in on a significant detail as Phelps rotates an
item, providing a real sense of discovery as
you turn up a vital lead. Conversely, each
scene is filled with pointless incidental junk
that has no bearing on the case, but the
thoroughness of leaving no stone unturned
adds a banal counterpoint to the revelatory
police work. It’s ironic that something
so relatively rote works so much better than
the experimental, expensive idea
that was meant to be the wind beneath
LA Noire’s wings.
Clues found here form the basis of
interrogations. Suspects’ faces mug, squint
and sneer exaggeratedly. Stare at them for
long enough, though, and it becomes harder
to tell whether that look to the left is
because they’re guilty or they’re just
thinking about what’s for tea. As over-the-
top as some of them are – often hilariously
so – the subtleties of those digitised
performances are often lost, and further
muddled by confusing options. During
development, the original Truth, Doubt and
Lie options had been tested as Coax, Force
and Accuse, and in the 2017 remaster these
became the similar Good Cop, Bad Cop, and
Accuse, supposedly making them more
context-appropriate. Bad Cop is certainly
more apt than Doubt, since it is intended to
aggressively uncover further lines of
questioning. However, it often seems overly
harsh – especially when you have no real
reason to doubt a suspect’s answer. An
accusation will fall flat if you don’t have
evidence to back it up, yet Good Cop can
also confusingly be the correct choice amid
a litany of brazen lies. A suspect may appear
to squint nervously or bite their lip, but
while this is meant to indicate they are not
telling the whole truth, it doesn’t exactly
frame them for anything unlawful either.
Get any of your choices wrong – which
is unfortunately often – and a downbeat
musical motif plays while the camera cuts to
Phelps’ perplexed face. It’s an unforgiving
system that leaves you short-stacked for
solving the case, making save-scumming
tempting. Theoretically, if you’ve managed
to gather every clue and chase down every
lead, your notebook will be a cornucopia of
evidence guaranteed to have your perp
