Adventure Gamers - Forums

I have already talked about dialogue puzzles in this edition of the Midweek Puzzle, but another game that also uses dialogue puzzles as one of its main puzzle types, in fact to an even greater extend and in a very different way than Culpa Innata, is L.A. Noire!

The whole game is based on interviewing different witnesses and suspects, either in the interrogation room at the police station, like in the picture, or out in the field. The idea is that whenever your suspect/witness makes a statement, then you have to chose whether you believe they are telling the Thruth, seriously Doubt that they are being honest, or outright call their Lie, you however have to be very careful with this, as there is no going back on your decision!

If you for example say that you believe their alibi, then you might see a self-satisfied smirk on their face because they know that they have just gotten away with murder, well .. at least that they have gotten away with a lie, and you know that you screwed up. But there is no regret button, there is no way of going back and say “Regarding your alibi, I know I said I believed you, but I have changed my mind, so where were you really between ...”. And similar if you wrongly accuse someone of lying, they might get upset and offended, and will refuse to talk to you, at least on the topic in question, and you might miss some valuable information.

In order to help you with making these decisions, Rockstar used another novel idea and used motion capture on real actors to capture the facial expressions and body language of the actors during these interviews. The idea is that simply by observing their body language you should get a good idea of whether they are being completely honest, have something to hide or are outright lying to you. Personally I found these signs to be rather obvious and was only rarely fooled, but I have heard others complain that they had major problems actually reading the suspects in this way. You however never have to rely purely on your skill at reading body language or intuition, simple common sense and contradicting evidence also plays a large part. For example you don’t have to be a human lie detector to suspect that someone is lying, when you have two witnesses placing a suspect at a crime scene, and they claim that they were somewhere else.

The difference between Doubt and Lie is a bit more subtle, and in fact “doubt” is a poorly chosen word as they both mean that you think a witness/suspect is lying. The difference is whether or not you have any evidence to prove they are lying, if not, then the doubt option will allow you to try to intimidate or lure the interviewee into telling you more or perhaps even confess, whereas the lie option requires that you present some hard evidence, either in the form of conflicting statements from witnesses or physical evidence.

This is also imo the biggest weakness of the game. The problem is that it is rather touchy when it comes to choosing the correct evidence. For example you might have some evidence that an interviewee is lying, chose the lie option and present the evidence, but the game doesn’t actually count it as (sufficient) evidence, and the correct solution was instead to use the doubt option, or you might have 5 different pieces of evidence, but the game requires that you select the exact three pieces that the developers had in mind. I actually screwed up a couple of interviews, simply because the developers and I have different opinions on what constitute evidence


Some of you are probably thinking “well that is all very good, but how does that solve the basic conundrum of dialogue puzzles? And if you can’t undo your decisions and start the interviews all over, does that mean that you can reach a dead end and the game becomes un-winnable?”

The answer is that Rockstar also used another novel idea to solve this conundrum. Instead of having a single case to solve, like in most detective games, it consist of several individual cases, an idea the Frogwares also used in the latest Sherlock Holmes game. The idea is that yes, you can completely screw up each case and reach a situation where it is impossible to actually solve the case, but the game continues regardless of that. You have to suffer the burden of not having solved the case, and perhaps some ridicule from you colleagues and a reprimand from your boss, but the game continues with the next case.

There is also some leeway in the individual cases. Typical there are perhaps 5 different pieces of evidence that can be used to solve the case, arrest and charge the culprit, but you might only need perhaps 2 or 3 of those to make a case strong enough for a conviction. So you don’t need to ace every single interview, as long as you get something like 2/3 right, then it will be enough to solve the case.

One last, and in my opinion, quite brutal idea, is that there is only one single save file - and it will automatically overwrite it at each interview!
The idea is obviously to prevent the players from solving the dialogue puzzle and the individual cases by trial & error and save-scumming - but it is quite brutal. If you screw up an interview and know it, your only options is to either continue and hope that you will still be able to solve the case, or to restart the whole case from scratch!

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Whether or not this is actually a good idea is more questionable. Personally I found that the risk of completely failing a case, and having to restart it (simply leaving it unsolved was never an option for me ), meant that I couldn’t resist looking up the answers in a walkthrough, whenever I was in doubt as to whether I should use doubt or lie, and which exact evidence I should use. Having the option to reload an old save, instead of completely restarting the case, would have meant that I could have resisted that urge.


P.S. The game also has action sequences in the form of driving and shoot-outs, but these are 100% optional, so despite what some might say it is 100% an adventure game.

P.P.S. Sorry that the Midweek Puzzle is one day late this week.

I think this mechanic was broken. It was too limited, especially since doubt always meant going into an ALL CAPS RAGE and yelling at the interviewee (even if said interviewee was a 15-year old girl that was just raped), and a lot of the time you COULDN’T see any telltale body language signs, making it feel like trial-and-error. Except trial-and-error wasn’t allowed…

And I disagree about the action sequences being optional. You had to fail them three times before being given the option to skip, and if you skipped, you missed the flow of what transpired.
Not that I mind, I didn’t skip anything. In fact, I think I only got the option to skip a sequence twice (one was a tail where I kept getting spotted until I started to tail from the other side of the street instead, and the other was a trench run while chased by a bulldozer - this one in particular took me LOTS of attempts)...

TimovieMan - 03 September 2015 12:24 PM

I think this mechanic was broken. It was too limited, especially since doubt always meant going into an ALL CAPS RAGE and yelling at the interviewee (even if said interviewee was a 15-year old girl that was just raped), and a lot of the time you COULDN’T see any telltale body language signs, making it feel like trial-and-error. Except trial-and-error wasn’t allowed…

Well, I had absolutely no problem reading their body language
In fact must of the time I thought they were overacting and that the telltale signs were too obvious .. and I didn’t even put an effort into it, most of the time I didn’t really pay attention to their body language, but just left that part to my subconscious. Perhaps that is actually the best way to do it?

That using the doubt button meant that he would usually start yelling, was a bit annoying, that much I agree on, and it should really have been called something else, like “intimidate”.

TimovieMan - 03 September 2015 12:24 PM

And I disagree about the action sequences being optional. You had to fail them three times before being given the option to skip, and if you skipped, you missed the flow of what transpired.
Not that I mind, I didn’t skip anything. In fact, I think I only got the option to skip a sequence twice (one was a tail where I kept getting spotted until I started to tail from the other side of the street instead, and the other was a trench run while chased by a bulldozer - this one in particular took me LOTS of attempts)...

No matter how annoying the tail sequence was, then it wasn’t an action sequence, just a “follow target without getting spotted” sequence, as for the “trench run”, then I can’t remember that one. But to the best of my recollection, it was only the optional side-quest that you receive on your police radio, that contained any outright action, and you could simply ignore those calls, in fact you would only get them if you drove manually, instead of letting your partner drive.

Iznogood - 04 September 2015 04:42 AM

as for the “trench run”, then I can’t remember that one.

See here. It’s in one of the last missions, as Jack Kelso instead of Cole Phelps. That bulldozer was closer to me in my playthrough, IIRC, and it took me a good while to figure out that turning around to shoot it DID have an effect: it slowed it down. Still needed a few attempts after I found that out…

But to the best of my recollection, it was only the optional side-quest that you receive on your police radio, that contained any outright action, and you could simply ignore those calls, in fact you would only get them if you drove manually, instead of letting your partner drive.

Yeah, those always boiled down to a chase or a shootout. I did a couple in the beginning and then didn’t bother at all.
And then I let my partner drive everywhere, which greatly improved the tediousness of the game.

It’s a very good game, and one of the best-looking I’ve ever played, but it had a lot of flaws as well, imo.