Indie Corner: Late Shift

Have you ever wanted to change the ending or a certain part of a movie you’ve watched? What if the hero didn’t make it in time and the villain killed the woman he loved.. Suddenly sounds like a different movie, right? The Late Shift takes this train of thoughts to the next level and turns into a movie you can play out in seven different ways, with a total of 180 decisions (not in one run) for you, the protagonist, to make. Give someone the car keys? Bargain with a crime lord? Are you going up or down in an elevator? It’s all up to you.. Welcome to the Late Shift.

The Late Shift made its debut in 2016 in the form of the first interactive movie. Sounds weird, doesn’t it, since 4D is also ‘interactive’. Well, the Late Shift gives the word a new meaning.. CtrlMovie, a small startup developed a technique to screen a movie to a huge audience (or you, on your Switch!), in which there were time-based events inside the story. The audience had to pick what path the protagonist would take next. Enter the car with the robber? Try to make a run for it? Grab his gun and shoot the robber? All these decisions will move the movie forward in a different way, even if you don’t make a choice. But what makes this different from any, let’s say, visual novel? Well, Ctrlmovie works likes this:

With CtrlMovie you get features like the dynamic jump actions or separate audio tracks which allow for an uninterrupted, seamless playback of your movie.

Combine this with HD imagery, a total of four hours of screenplay and a good story – and you get a very decent non-anime-related visual novel-movie hybrid.

But, what is the Late Shift about? Well:

Matt, a smart student, has to prove his innocence after being forced to take part in a bold heist at a famous London auction house. The consequences take him on a journey across London to escape the twisted web he finds himself caught in, discover the truth and gain his retribution. How will the audience decide to act when everything is turning against him?

It’s much more than just ‘another heist movie’ – it’s a journey that gives a sneak-peak into the mind of a writer and director. How do choices impact the output and the outcome? I really liked the fact I could choose things outside the normal boundaries of movies. Why should you be a hero who gets the girl in the end? Go for the money and run away without any broken legs, why wouldn’t you? Well, for the same reason you’ll never see Thor kill Iron Man, or vice versa, it’s not part of the guidelines for a “good movie”.

The game itself plays smooth, which is a plus. I tested it in both handheld and dock, but there were no frame drops and the imagery looked stunning on both ends. Choices were not game-breaking, but progressed the story along nicely. When I finished the game for the first time, I had made 58 choices and found 12 of the 14 chapters. I could still end the story in six different ways.. But do I want to? The only part that really annoyed me about Late Shift was the absence of chapters. You can’t hop back into a chapter you have unlocked and take a slightly different path. You’ll have to replay, the, whole, thing.

But, even so, The Late Shift made me think about the reason people do things in a certain way. Are we selfish or are we selfless.. Are we sheep in a herd or lone wolves, out for our own goals? You decide.