Erica is a new PlayStation 4 exclusive which comes developed by Flavourworks and is published by Sony Entertainment. The game is a full motion video (FMV) game that allows the player to control live action videos by making choices, interacting with the environment and choosing dialogue options.
When I first saw the trailer and some of the promotional material for this game, I must admit, it was only last week. Reading up online I could see the game was originally announced in 2017 but it seems it has been fairly quiet since then. But I was quite interested to check this one out and even more so when I saw the price on the PlayStation Store for $13.95, I thought that it seemed like actually quite a good deal.
Finishing the game was able to be achieved in one sitting and it is just a little over 2 hours long. But as the story does have different branching options to choose and multiple endings, it can potentially have 2-6 hours of play time. Think of this as kind of a live action version of games like Detroit: Become Human or Until Dawn.
The story of the game focuses on the character of Erica. She recently lost both her parents and there is a police investigation underway to find out the cause, Erica is struggling with it. Erica not being one to sit around and do nothing starts to investigate the cause of her father’s death.
Erica is essentially a murder mystery adventure and as it progresses you will learn a lot and find a lot of clues. The actors all do well and Holly Earl who plays Erica does a fine job with all the facial expressions and also with the more emotional scenes. But the rest of the cast are fairly forgettable though and I didn’t really get much out of their performances. Other characters also don’t have much depth to them and I was left wondering what they were all about.
The gameplay for Erica allows you to either play the game with the PS4 control or to use your smart phone by downloading the Erica PS4 app. I used the smart phone app using my Razer Phone 2 and found that it was very responsive and fast. It was interesting to play a live action story and control it on my TV by swiping my fingers across my phone’s screen. I’ve had this experience before on previous games such as Hidden Agenda but the app did make my phone very hot back then. This time though I had no real issue on the Razer Phone 2 but I can’t speak for all phones on the market and how they will perform.
Razer Phone 2 Deals
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I’d love to say the graphics were great but it’s all live action so what can I really say? Compared the film and and TV sets. I thought that the production quality was similar to TV quality. It was good, but it didn’t look too high budget.
Overall Erica is a short, yet interesting game experience. I am hoping that its popularity can maybe bring more developers to this genre because there some possibilities to do something interesting with it should a great script and great actors be assembled. Erica does have an interesting story and a decent tale to explore. It’s a little bit let down by some of the side characters, both in terms of acting and character depth. But don’t make that make you skip this title. At it’s low price, it’s good value for what you need to pay. The game was a fun experience and I recommend it to gamers looking for something new to experiment with on their PS4.
