Wales Interactive's The Complex is the latest interactive movie (also called full motion video or FMV) gaming experience, which puts players in a live-action story and tasks them with making decisions over where the story will go. Think of Netflix's Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and you'll have the right idea.
Unlike Bandersnatch, however, The Complex is nowhere near as compelling, original or, most importantly, interactive. None of the choices feel all that vital to the outcome, the acting and storytelling is generally poor throughout and there's simply never a sense that this needed to be an FMV title at all.
The Complex opens with main character Dr. Amy Tenent (Michelle Mylett of Letterkenny) treating victims of a chemical attack in the fictional country of Kindar, which was perpetrated by its dictator leader. Naturally, because this is an interactive movie, the player must choose who to save. The problem is that The Complex offers no immediate reason to care about either of these characters. It also does very little in building Amy as an interesting or three-dimensional character. This is a disappointing pattern that continues throughout with most of the side characters failing to make an emotional impact or justify their existence.
The story of The Complex then shifts to years in the future where a majority of the action takes place. Amy is now working on developing nanotechnology for a colonization mission to Mars. Without spoiling anything, Amy eventually finds herself trapped in the complex where these nanites are stored. From this point forward, Amy (through the player) must make vital decisions over who lives and who dies and escape from the complex. Because the game insists on hitting every science fiction cliche in the book, the company she works for is not who they seem and she must battle against them as well as outside forces to survive.
While all of this could have been interesting in spite of its various cliches, The Complex fails to be absorbing in almost every way. Most of the action consists of characters sitting around and debating what to do next. Mylett is a good actor and does the best she can with the material given, but it's not enough. The rest of the cast of characters and acting skill ranges from mediocre to poor and it all adds up to something approaching a B movie feel, only with surprisingly good production values.
While The Complex touts 8 different endings, with each playthrough taking about an hour, only a few are actually distinctly different from the others, creating the illusion that player choice matters. The only place The Complex comes close in pulling off its interactive experience promise is in how Amy interacts with characters. This is tracked in-game by Relationship Tracking and Personality Tracking meters and they can affect how other characters respond to Amy. If there's one saving grace for The Complex, this is it.
Overall, The Complex is another FMV game that does not live up to the potential this genre of interactive movie/gaming hybrid could potentially offer. While the genre and concept of interactive stories has gained some traction over the last few years thanks to streaming platforms like Netflix and YouTubers, it clearly has a long way to go outside of the mainstream. Unfortunately, titles like The Complex will not do much to change that fact.
The Complex is available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC. Screen Rant was provided with an Xbox One copy for the purposes of this review.