After Hidden Agenda, here's this week's second entry in the "sub-David Cage" category of cinematic narrative games - although that categorisation is halfway unfair to both. Hidden Agenda is boring and misconceived, but structurally innovative; Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier, by contrast, has its storytelling head screwed on, but only pays lip service to player choice. As easy as it is to poke holes in Cage's barmy plots, his vainglory and his clumsy gravitas, playing a couple of less successful imitators is a quick way to remind yourself that Quantic Dream has a rare mastery of the smoke and mirrors required to make a player feel involved in a scene.
Last Frontier is a spin-off from the recent movie series, set between 2014's Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and this year's War for the Planet of the Apes. There's no direct connection to the plot of the films: the game follows a breakaway tribe of talking apes who settle in the Rocky mountains and cross paths, violently, with a local enclave of human survivors of the flu that has ravaged the world's population. This game, though, is not just a spin-off in the narrative sense - there's a direct link here to the film productions. Last Frontier was developed by London's Imaginati Studios and published by The Imaginarium, a production company specialising in performance capture technology, which captured and rendered the impressively subtle and expressive ape performances in the movies (including studio co-founder Andy Serkis as Caesar).
For the Imaginarium and the Apes license-holders at Fox, then, this game is about seeing if the technology used in the movies' making can be used (or, probably, "leveraged") to make what are doubtless being referred to in boardrooms as "cross-media experiences". What it means for you and me is that this game was made by people who could draw directly on a wealth of experience in acting, rendering and animating totally believable and empathetic characters who just happen to be chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. It really shows - to the extent that the human characters seem wooden and unrelatable by comparison, and the decision to dedicate equal amounts of screen time to the primate and human communities feels like a mistake.
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