The Complex Review (Dohi64)
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the complex is a simple, less than 2-hour interactive movie, not unlike late shift (same publisher, different 'developer'). watch a few scenes, make a decision, another scene, another decision, you get the idea. some will be more meaningful than others and this one lets you skip repeating scenes after the first playthrough, making it easier to explore other avenues. be careful though, tab skips choices too and some scenes are long with only minor differences, so you can't always jump to the next decision immediately. there's a pause choices toggle, shows the timer but when it runs out, the movie literally pauses until you do something. settings also include windowed mode, resolutions, a single volume slider, brightness and subtitle toggle, size and language.
dr. amy is a doctor, trying to help survivors of a chemical attack in a made-up asian country. when that fails, she becomes a pr bunny for a scientific company definitely not up to no good in their high-tech laboratories. amy's unaware, of course, at least initially, as on the surface it's about putting a british guy on mars for the good of mankind, using nanocells instead of sending a whole hospital. then an incident happens, we find out everything's connected and it's up to amy to reveal the truth, bring justice for all, etc. it's your average b-movie plot, writing and acting, as expected from a game like this, no objections from me, love these. except rees, he was annoying as hell.
unnecessarily complicating things is constant relationship status updates. a subtle hexagon in the corner lets you know if something happened instead of telltale's 'x will remember that', but it's the same general idea. you can look at your stats and relationship percentages in the pause menu or press 's'. if you lie, honesty goes down, sensitivity might goes up, plus whatever that means to the person you were talking to. I don't think they do anything, checks are probably on decisions, not percentages (except for one achievement, but that falls under the nothing category, it's just an achievement).
make sure to quit at the right time to avoid progress loss because saving only happens between chapters (should be after every action and decision) and there's no chapter selection. the game wipes the save after finishing it, but I was prepared and backed it up. the final decisions are still quicker like this than skipping most of the game over and over, though after a while a playthrough is a matter of minutes, so I didn't even need my backup. the usual annoyance of an unskippable company logo on startup, followed by half a dozen skippable ones is sadly a given and data collection is opt-out, not opt-in, so if it's a concern, click data privacy in the settings to get rid of it.
I basically never replay games, but I go through these things twice. the second time with alternate choices provides mostly new footage, so it's okay even if scene-skipping only kicks in during the third run (or never in lazy games like late shift), but I tend not to bother after that and just youtube the conclusions that can't be seen by a quick replay of the final section. 9 endings, half of which are just slight variations of each other, plus nearly 200 scenes (again with a lot of nearly identical ones), require a lot of skipthroughs and all the branches make it a bit tedious, even though a lot of them don't matter, I don't think. I ended up getting them all but left a few scenes unseen. doubt they'd reveal anything meaningful and half the endings aren't worth bothering with either.
while functionality-wise it's an improvement over certain other titles and just as enjoyable, if not more (rees sadly balances it out though), it's recommendable if you like cheesy b-movies (is there another kind?), but it still doesn't work completely as it should, so wait for a deep sale.