TIME EXTEND
rolling his eyes. And, after a good hour or
more of playing a particular case, that final
interrogation at police HQ should form
a powerful denouement to Phelps’ solid,
unwavering detective grind. And it does –
when it makes sense.
In one case, Phelps is chasing a serial
killer and under our grilling, a hobo admits
to being a murderer. Yet when we Accuse,
and present the bloodied rope we found in
his possession (a sure match for our victim’s
strangulation marks), we’ve somehow called
it wrong. In service of the narrative, we’ve
solved the case because the hobo is found
guilty, but our own police work now seems
flawed, our time spent on the case made
moot. It tells us something that even the
game’s star struggled to make the right
choices. Staton revealed that when he finally
got to play the game he’d read 5,000 pagesof a script for, he was at no advantage when
it came to sweating a confession out of
a suspect. “I was actually really terrible at
the game,” he told GQ in 2017. “I sat down
with my wife and played it, and she said,
‘I can’t believe you’re not better at this.’”For all that, LA Noire still perfectly
captures the tone of a gritty noir detective
drama thanks to its on-point script and
those excellent crime scene investigations.
Even the interrogation mechanic, for all its
flaws, is a clever conceit that if nothing else
succeeds in putting you directly into Phelps’
wingtips and making you think like a real
detective might. As a result, LA Noire feels
quite unlike any game before or since.
Yet there are so many superfluous
elements borrowed from other games that it
feels as though the developer wasn’tparticularly confident in the game’s identity.
A painstaking reproduction of 1940s LA
covers eight square miles – bigger than GTA
IV’s Liberty City. It’s just populated enough
to keep the illusion intact while you’re
driving through it, but it’s almost entirely
devoid of things to do, and most crimes and
locations in the main story are within a few
blocks of each other. To give the developers
the benefit of the doubt, perhaps this was adeliberate way of keeping players immersed
in the real grind of police work, designed to
avoid drawing comparisons with the faster
pace of GTA’s vehicular mayhem. Aping GTA
though, different models of car are available
to drive (95 period-correct automobiles, in
fact). A lovely detail, if a little pointless,
since ‘dispatch call’ sidemissions can only be
answered in police cars, while a luxurious
licensed soundtrack of era-appropriate artists
such as Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee is
drowned out when your siren’s blaring.
There are collectibles, but these exist purely
to reinforce the idea of LA Noire as an open-
world game. It isn’t, or at least it doesn’t
need to be, and these extraneous moments
break the pace of the story. In truth it’s
a game that’s simply big for the hell of it.
But aside from pandering to 2011’s
expectations of videogames, LA Noire feltTHE INTERROGATION MECHANIC IS
A CLEVER CONCEIT THAT SUCCEEDS IN
PUTTING YOU INTO PHELPS’ WINGTIPS
Examining and manipulating
items and checking documents
for key information is all part
of Phelps’ day-to-day workInterviewing witnesses, such
as this boss of a company hit
by an arson attack, helps you
build your case. Successfully
determining whether they
are telling the truth will
provide more clues