So bad it’s…good? That’s the direction I could go with The Fame Game: Welcome to Hollywood, but not entirely committed to that statement. FMV titles are a guilty pleasure, and like the point and click genre, it’s a little niche. Because of that, budgets and gameplay are often limited, and unfortunately, the same applies here.
A review title that landed in my inbox, as I’d never heard of it previously, I dived straight in without reading anything about it besides ‘FMV’. What was presented was a collection of archive footage of LA (or at least looked like it), followed by some Temu equivalent of Desperate Housewives – coming from someone who’s never seen it, yet it’s the impression that it gives.
The Fame Game: Welcome to Hollywood as a concept is clear: rise through the ranks from being an extra to superstardom as a soap opera favourite. Along the way, the predominantly female cast will be all over you like catnip, and you’ll be able to attempt to woo them through dialogue choices and exploration. With multiple paths and endings, it’ll take a fair amount of time to see everything on offer – including a ‘secret’ character.
However, it’s not as straightforward as that. If dating were as easy as it is portrayed here, all men would be fanny magnets, as all you have to do is show up. There’s no bad response, as the women will be frothing at the gash just with the presence of your potent pheromone-wielding vessel. It’s simply unrealistic. But that’s not why we’re here, folks, right? If we wanted real, we’d be out there charming the fairer sex with our cunning linguistics. This is a game, we want to see T&A. Right?
Again, not knowing anything about the game, there were no expectations, and I did not believe The Fame Game: Welcome to Hollywood would be an interactive skin flick. After an atrocious introduction of production values, we enter a ‘dressing room’ to see the leading man getting off with some floozy in a bikini. Ah, ok… this might be an adult title. It isn’t, per se. There are no reveals other than the leads in their undies and carrot-dangling flirtations. If that’s why you came here, bugger off and find something actually rude.
What we’re left with is a choose-your-own-adventure pathway to stardom, with some flirtiness along the way. There are six characters to spend your time with, as well as a secret character. These range from the diva to the girl-next-door, and between segments, you’ll have options to go speak to those that pique your interest. This is the core part of gameplay, as the ‘acting’, that is, the role you play in this bizarre soap opera, is horrendous.
A director will give you prompts, and you have the opportunity to stray off the script (the scriptwriter being one of the wooables). Even more weirdly, as the story progresses, you complete a livestream with an audience with the actor yelling cut and swapping out actors to play dual roles. It’s incredibly messy, makes no sense, and in no way is ‘so bad that it’s good’. It lacks the wit of Not For Broadcast, as well as the autonomy.
A regular cameo in The Fame Game: Welcome to Hollywood, by Interactive Films, has to be the cameraman. Who had the great idea to place mirrors throughout the set? You’ll see ‘you’ walk past the mirror multiple times in shot with a Steadicam, the eyeline will go from eye level to overpowering when ‘you’ stand up, or walk backwards in your apartment, actors will look off-screen towards the end of a cut, looking distracted or disinterested, and these edits will be left in. The continuity is horrendous, and yes, that’s to accommodate the interactive element, but even that’s massively restrictive. For me to say I studied film is irrelevant: if you’ve watched any sort of TV or film production, you’ll get it.
Adopting a soggy shit sandwich analogy, I’m going to say what’s good about it. The levels of immersion. As it’s real people and from a POV, there’s something incredibly alluring about the experience. We’ve already established we’re not here to get off or to replace any real-life relationships with some replayable clips, yet the format does have its magic.
Again, the acting across the board is terrible, and the dialogue is incredibly cringeworthy, but there is that element of voyeurism, without getting pervy about it, of feeling you are connecting with another person, and it does feel quite intimate. I just wish the person representing me would shut the hell up and not ask his object of affection to ‘come to bed with me’. You’ve blown it, dude. That said, on the first attempt, I did manage to get the person who appealed to me most to do the deed and join me on my journey to stardom. Can you guess who it was? Oh.. It’s not real, and she doesn’t know I exist <sniff sniff>.
And interestingly, despite all these negatives about the production from the set to the script, dialogue to the dodgy acting, and having compulsory subtitles dominate the experience, I swiftly went back and had an overview of the possible narrative arcs and started exploring all the other areas – including the bonus promotional videos featuring the actors. Yes, FMV is still incredibly niche, and there are some far, far better titles, but if this is your thing and you can differentiate between how actors in a game behave to actual people, then it might be for you.
So bad that it’s quite good in places? Perhaps it’s that uncertainty of where videogame romance might take you (everyone does it, whether it’s The Witcher to Cyberpunk 2077), so don’t pretend you don’t. The bottom line is The Fame Game: Welcome to Hollywood’s not going to win any Emmys, and most likely an abundance of Razzies.
