Welcome to our review of The Gallery, a new interactive movie to hit the Playstation, where you have two storylines to play.
An art curator is held hostage by a portraitist who threatens to detonate a bomb unless their demands are met. ‘The Gallery’ contains two interactive narratives – set in 1981 (with a female protagonist) and 2021 (with a male protagonist). Both eras are significant periods of socio-political unrest in Britain and there are distinct similarities and differences across the two stories. The viewer must make decisions in a bid to better understand and escape their captor. However, it soon becomes apparent that not only the life of the protagonist hinges on these decisions but also the lives of others.
Like any other interactive movie, The Gallery relies on your choices and approaches to evolve the game, from when the art curator is held hostage to the awkward conversations held between them and their captor.
For my gameplay, I chose not to have timed decisions but delayed decisions, so I could just pick an option when presented. Do I want to drop the telephone call or keep helping? No split-second decisions but being able to just slowly pick.
I decided to pick a slightly aggressive approach to the story, challenging my captor and more often than not influencing decisions and relationships. I do not know if this influenced the video much from the start, but my captor slowly became a real sleazy man.
Even when my hostage situation was somehow turned around by invading burglars and the following chaos that ensues, it just all exploded in my face, I loved it a lot. I must admit this slow mode to the game, where I can just put my controller down, I really like it.
The weirdness of the captor just restarting his painting after getting mugged by those burglars, it is really an awesome story and I can not wait to start playing the alternate story. I have not decided yet if I will be updating this review with more information or to completely let you experience it yourself.
The actors so far, have been less awkward than some other interactive games I have played. I really like how well they expressed their feelings in the storyline I picked. It must be hard on an actor to perform multiple storylines for a game like these…
What I did not always appreciate, the wait in between options. Some transfers of scenes did not go by fluently. The often multiple-second delay was more often than not a disturbance in the enjoyment. It is like watching a video on youtube and it has to buffer.
It felt very similar to that and while it should not be a very big deal, I still had this issue on Playstation 5, a supposedly more powerful device but it still has these weird inconsistent hiccups when switching scenes. A shame really, it really is a good movie/game.
In conclusion, from all the interactive movies I have played, this one surely is one of the most interesting ones and that moment when someone dies, God, that was awesome….
