Sometimes games are so bad they are good again and Vegas Tales falls somewhere in the ballpark of this description. It’s an FMV adventure that has no budget, no gloss, no features and no sense in its story either. It’s a curious oddity that will appeal to future cult classic identifiers like me. It’s funny for a mixture of reasons.
You play as a character tasked with finding a new owner for a vegas casino as the owner has three months left to live. The problem is – he has zero friends and so he has picked four very random donors to offload the casino to and you have to choose who gets it. Each character is purposely broken and unlikeable and so you have to make the best of a bad job. Spoilers for the rest of the paragraph. The magician secretly wants to leave the casino. A regular gambler is so unlucky the implication is you’ll send the casino into its doom and she’ll be dying too anyway. The young couple getting married…aren’t. They just want a room upgrade. A happy younger client is apparently visiting yearly with her parents but you soon find out it is an age gap threesome with lots of daddy name calling.
The game plays out like an NPC conversation in a point-n-click. You can’t go forward unless you ask everything and asking everything means you have no real choice in how conversations go. There is no detective gameplay to speak of, it is just choosing the next option and watching. This is very disappointing as the whole set-up is to interview them and find out whose best. There is no skill at all. Even choosing the conversation options has problems as it glitches visually as the UI moves slightly between frames. Basic and bare bones, it screams cheap. There is only one decision point too – when you decide who gets the casino. The entire game takes place on a single sofa and freeze frames as you choose your next question. If FMV Interactive wants to really make a splash in the genre, it needs to work on these issues for future titles. These things make a title feel dead and lifeless.
It all feels quite muted and meh. The only upside is that the acting is by far the best bit of the game. It is fun to see College Humour’s Katie Marovitch in something very different yet still very Katie Marovitch – tragic and comedic in a nutshell. Everyone else does well too. It is just a shame they have so little to work with and the story makes zero sense. It all lines Vegas Tales up for being one of those so-bad-its-good FMV adventures. It’s a weird and off-kilter 90-minute trip that will appeal to those who enjoy the camp and stupid side of gaming.
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