For those who view video games as an adjunct to cinema rather than an alternative, the rise and fall of the interactive movie in the mid-1990s was something of a befuddling mystery. For a moment, and from a particular angle, the cinematic Choose Your Own Adventure, a genre facilitated by the advent of CD-Rom technology that allowed film clips to be spliced together to tell a story according to the whims of the viewer, seemed like the future of games. It was not to be.
Late Shift is one of a gathering number of contemporary projects, from Quantum Break to Her Story to Wales Interactive's own The Bunker, to return to the inextinguishable promise of interactive filmmaking. This is a broadly traditional take on the concept, albeit one that's been lavishly filmed, and penned by Michael R. Johnson, co-writer of Guy Ritchie's 2009 boisterous take on Sherlock Holmes. You play as Matt Thomson, a wunderkind mathematics student with a fruity South London accent who moonlights as a security guard in a car park, an underground stable for luxury vehicles.
One night, while working the late shift, Thomson becomes embroiled in a plot to scam an eminent London auction house. The target is a Ming dynasty-era rice bowl that is worth millions. It's a choice of McGuffin that leads to some inadvertently comical lines (e.g.: "I haven't got your fucking rice bowl"), but the script reassures us that it's a prize for which, over the centuries, "many have died". Thomson's descent into the criminal world is swift but not necessarily inexorable. The choices you make as the story unravels dictate whether or not he crosses lines that take him into the realms of felonious guilt, or remains an unwilling co-conspirator, able to later prove his innocence.
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