Fahrenheit (Sega 32X) review "Fire Retarded"

It’s almost gotten to the point where I can’t do this anymore. Even when I space them months apart, these little attacks on the 32X’s library of awful FMV games fill me with a kind of dread I’d rather not bother with. I mean, sometimes, I’m almost pleasantly surprised; Night Trap was a goofy kind of bad B-movie fun, and I could distract myself with the legal shenanigans surrounding that release. Other games like Corpse Killer at least had some kind of broken ambition in them while FMV basketball game Slam City made a play for being something unique and different. It also gave us a (badly) rapping Scottie Pippen, which the world sorely needed. SEGA’s Fahrenheit is just so…. bland. The entire thing severely lacks even the destructive creativity of the Digital Pictures collection. They’re all differing shades of bloody awful, but none of them feel as phoned in as Fahrenheit does.

It’s a game about fire-fighters, and you can’t tell me that’s not a premises with unlimited potential which remains a significantly untapped source for video games. Maybe SEGA’s efforts here have put the industry off. In it, you play a fresh faced rookie who, on his first day, saves three people from burning to death (off camera) and, so impressed is his superior, that he places this inexperienced chap as the pointman of the fire and rescue service. This is a ludicrous decision on almost every level, putting the colleagues he leads into burning buildings in as much danger as the people awaiting rescue. So starts his fruitful career of exploring one of three locations via a grainy FMV window, getting lost, and dying.

Like its FMV siblings, Fahrenheit started life on the Mega CD and was upgraded to take advantage of the 32X’s extra processing power in the hopes that a game’s laundry list of ills would be cured by a bigger playing window and a higher video quality. This upgrade saved exactly none of these games, but all showed markedly improved cosmetics. It would be unfair to suggest this untrue of Fahrenheit, but it certainly shows the least improvement of its horrid little gathering of rehashes. Really, this is a bit of a shame, because the one thing that deserves some credit are the sets. Say what you want about Digital Pictures, but they certainly weren’t afraid to set shit on fire then demand their camera crew and band of expendable extras wade through the flames.

The first stage isn’t awful (which exhausts the last dribble of praise I have left for Fahrenheit); you enter a burning house with a teenage girl suspected to be trapped inside. The house is contained enough that you’ll keep your bearings with a little effort and small enough that it doesn’t have to rely on rehashing the same clips over and over again in a cheap attempt to artificially increase its size. What it does set out early is its ability to ask the most moronic questions it can dream up. You and your firefighting team have a displayed oxygen level which slowly decreases the more time you spend in the burning building, but you can top this back up by periodically discovering fire hazards wherein you’re offered a choice that will either gift you extra oxygen or burn you to death. Enter the house’s living area, and you’re faced with your first dastardly choice - a perplexing puzzle sure to test the logic skills of even the most adamant fire safety expert: there’s a kerosene heater nearby. Should you remove this highly flammable and explosive item from the burning room?



The worst thing about this isn’t the stupidity of the question wherein saying yes gives you some oxygen and saying no burns you alive, but you’re actually offered a response of maybe. Still, at least the kerosene heater has some sense of finality to it; getting it wrong and dying here is solely down to your not immediately disposing of a thing that really should have exploded and killed you by now. You find the next stupid choice in the kitchen where you’re asked if you want to shut the gas off of a burning oven. If you want to, you know, live, then you do. But then you, the green rookie your vastly more experienced rescue team condescendingly refer to only as ‘the kid’, are led to a supply closet containing three valves and told it’s up to you which one you pick. Even though a colleague suggests that he would pick the middle one, pick any but the one on your right, and you die.

Choices in Fahrenheit are either remarkably dumb or rely entirely on trial and error, expecting you to traipse through the same burning corridors over and over until the correct sequence is drummed into your mind. Inside the house, this isn’t too bad; there’s enough there to keep the scenario interesting but not enough that a few replays won’t significantly grate. It even briefly visits that brilliantly bad vibe, too - you can find the girl passed out under a duvet, because padded cotton is famously fire retardant, but, even if you save her, her family will be mighty pissed off if you don’t rescue the family cat and a random box of jewelry as well.



This all changes in the next two stages. The second level is a hotel where you walk down the same line of doors over and over again, where every location looks so similar to the rest of the building that getting lost is unavoidable. Here, your vastly more experienced fire rescue teammates will stop you every few turns to ask if they should check if the doors are hot before entering as if triggering backdrafts were a mild annoyance rather than a death sentence. In the hotel, you’re tasked with rescuing an elderly lady who refuses to leave the building without her birds who, for no obtainable reason, have been left in someone else’s apartment. So you’ll kick down dozens of doors looking for them, watching the same clip about entering an empty room over and over again, or discovering the same multiple stashes of flammable equipment that exist only to top up your air. Unless you get lucky, and find the room of a senile war vet sometimes shown wandering around outside. Here, you’ll find his private supply of subtle explosives such as hand grenades and sticks of bloody dynamite.



You’ll probably never reach the third and final stage, for which I envy you. Doing away with any sense of creativity, you explore an underground bunker set beneath a university where a professor has locked himself in a secure control room and is working on blowing the place up because he didn’t get that promotion he was after. The entire place is a literal maze that does nothing to distinguish one area from another, ensuring getting completely lost is a given. You’ll spend what time you have until you suffocate wandering around identical grey corridors that shoot identical fire spurts out of identical wall vents while the same steam hiss jump scare plays on loop between loading screens. Sometimes you’ll discover a secure looking door that, upon opening, will play one of two overused clips. Sometimes you’ll find a solid gold vase the professor will get angry at you for taking, and sometimes you’ll find a cage of lab rats which triggers him into singing the first bar of “Three Blind Mice”, then giggling to himself. To try and alleviate the fact you’ll see these scenes multiple times, sometimes the game mirrors them so the actors stand in slightly different places. Which makes exactly no difference.

Find the right path by dogged determination or blind luck, and you’ll have to work through various trial and error choices like how to disarm a bomb. Probability predicts you’ll fail these at least once, and get sent back to worthlessly meandering around in the hopes you’ll stumble across them again. Persevere (you won’t; but let’s pretend), and you’ll drag the professor out into the sunshine where he literally shakes his fist and tells the world this won’t be the last you see of him. But it will be, because that’s the end of the game. The fire chief gives you props, a colleague jokes that your reward will be that you won’t have to eat his cooking that night, and the cast throws back their heads and laughs. But their staged merriment does little to hide the lifeless void present in their grainy, compressed eyes. And then it’s over; the credits roll and it’s over. God help me, it’s finally over.



So. What have we learnt?

Fahrenheit isn’t just a bad game, it’s a painfully uninteresting one, relegating the ever present danger of firefighting into a bland, limited, by-the-numbers FMV dungeon crawler. But without the things that make dungeon crawlers worthwhile, like battles and loot. Instead, there’s fire and bad choices and about half an hour’s worth of recorded video stretched out into a game that lethargically drags on until what feels like the end of days. It sucks hours from your life, and your only reward is to save a box of jewellry, to get some guy fired from his teaching job and to carry a birdcage out of a flaming building to rapturous applause. When asked if you want to remove highly flammable objects from fire, you’re also given the chance to say maybe.

Maybe don’t bother with Fahrenheit. I understand that weird desire to check out awful games -- I share it; that’s how I got here in the first place, but there’s no sense of dumbfounded disbelief to be found here. There’s no disbelieving chuckles to be found, no sense of purpose. There’s just a mundane trudge towards an unsatisfying three minute conclusion and the lingering sense that you’ve wasted a slice of your life you’ll never get back.

Staff review by Gary Hartley (June 14, 2017) Gary Hartley arbitrarily arrives, leaves a review for a game no one has heard of, then retreats to his 17th century castle in rural England to feed whatever lives in the moat and complain about you.