Summary
FMV (Full Motion Video) games incorporate live-action video as an essential storytelling or gameplay element. The truly wonderful and innovative FMV games use the unique features of video to enhance the gameplay, rather than being just a gimmick. Mysteries are perfectly suited to the FMV form.
Mysteries afford plenty of wonderful opportunities to incorporate found footage and have logical spaces in which there might be cameras involved, such as in phones, interrogation rooms, and movie sets. This is a carefully selected list of the most intriguing FMV mystery games that reward creative thinking andpuzzle solving.
8Svoboda 1945: Liberation
“People Don’t Care About What Happened 50 Years Ago”
Svoboda 1945: Liberationis a thoroughly researched and intricately craftedhistoricalmystery FMV. The player is investigating a local schoolhouse in a small village to see if it is eligible for historical heritage protection. It turns out that the player character has an unexpected connection with the area and begins investigating what happened to their grandfather in the village. The mystery surrounds events in the aftermath of World War 2.
The stories are fictionalized versions of real accounts of those who witnessed similar events. It won’t be for everyone, but those who love a good mystery with a few emotional gut punches will love this. The acting is wonderful, and the story is fascinating. Subtitles are essential for those who don’t speak Czech.
7Return to Zork
Want some rye? Course y’do!
Players looking for a smooth gaming experience should probably steer clear of this FMV classic. But it has some of the most iconic moments in FMV video game history, including perhaps the most annoying, yet strangely charming, game-over cutscene in video games to date. It is a point-and-click FMV mystery with a strange cast of characters. The story and aesthetic go in some truly bizarre directions that are worth pushing through the clunky mechanics.
A lot of the older brilliant FMVgames from the 90s, such as theZorkgames, are absolute classics that any fan of the genre would appreciate. However, the puzzles are often obtuse and the controls are unwieldy. While they are not recommended for newcomers to the genre, they deserve a list all their own.
At Dead of Nightis one of the few truly terrifying FMV games to be released in the past 5 years. Players have to navigate a hotel straight out ofThe Shiningwhile being chased by a serial killer named Jimmy. The game uses FMV in many of the scenes in which the main character Maya is navigating the hotel, something which is less common in FMV games. This creates the illusion (and anxiety) of a real-life chase-and-hide sequence,
Maya must uncover the mysteries of Jimmy’s past in order to escape from him. This includes communicating with ghosts and finding clues through a scrying mirror. Hiding in bathrooms from Jimmy is a genuinely harrowing experience and the sudden fright from jump scares is well-earned.
5Simulacra
You Are Not Anna
The player-character finds a lost phone on their doorstep. Curiosity gets the better of them, and they start looking through it. Little do they know, but by doing so they are becoming embroiled in the mysterious disappearance of the phone’s owner. The plot is unraveled through discovering a string of passwords, data, and other clues to progress to the next stage.
The best way to experience Simulacra is onmobilefor maximum immersion. At times, it truly feels like sifting through a haunted phone. The sequels are quite good, but none quite capture the unexpected horror of the original.
4Contradiction
Ever Seen… This?
Contradictiontakes a page out of the classic FMV game handbook. It is a cheesy cozy murder mystery with an eccentric detective character and a cast of deceitful suspects. A college student is murdered in the small village of Edenton and Detective Jenks is sent to investigate.
Jenks has a bizarre questioning style and as he questions witnesses, their responses get logged into a notebook. The player then compares the answers to previous statements and looks for contradictions to uncover the truth. The narrative of the game feels like aMidsomerMurders-styleBritish cozy crime drama and manages to keep the player engaged until the end.
Her Storyis the FMV game that revitalized and changed the genre forever. It showed the potential of FMV to tap into thefound footagethat had become popular in horror cinema afterThe Blair Witch Project.Her Storytakes it a step further, using dated police technology to further enhance the believability of the footage. The player is tasked with searching through a police database to solve a murder. The unsettling soundscape includes office noises that indicate a world outside the screen and dynamic piano music that shifts according to the significance of the footage found.
The search system works well and players can tag specific words to follow up on later. As with many of these mystery games, there isn’t a lot of replayability, but like Sam Barlow’s other work, players may find themselves scouring through the videos looking for any that they missed. It has aged very well and is definitely a must-play for FMV enthusiasts and murder mystery game fans alike.
To explain the brilliance ofImmortalityis to give too much away. The basic premise is that the player has access to footage of an emerging film star named Marissa Marcel who disappeared before the films she starred in were ever released. By sorting through the footage, the player reconstructs the mysterious truth of what happened to her.
There are genuine surprises and beautifully executed twists that lean into the unique qualities of FMV found footage as a medium. The acting is fantastic, and the production of the footage deftly positions each clip within a particular era. It is a little tricky to navigate the interface at times, but players will adjust quite quickly to the mechanics.
Short Film Yötön Yö And Alan Wake The Musical
As a developer who deftly plays with the conventions of gameplay and the expectations of the player, Remedy’s FMV sequences inAlan Wake 2weren’t a complete surprise. But thelive-action musical numberwas something no one expected. The game transitions into live action on multiple occasions and the medium is used to great effect in demonstrating Alan’s tenuous grip on reality.
In fact, the live-action sections in The Dark Place seem far less real than Saga’s sections, which are ostensibly more grounded in reality. The musical sequence and the short film sequence feel more like magical realism than a gritty detective story. It really solidifies the stylistic and narrative similarities between theAlan Wakefranchise andTwin Peaks(one of its inspirations).
