SHE SEES RED Review for Xbox One

She Sees Red, by developer and publisher Rhinotales, came out of nowhere to become one of the absolute best games that I’ve played this year. I decided to go into this title without doing any prior research about the game and I was amazed by what I got to experience with this unique and mind-bending title that kept me on my toes and on the edge of my seat for the entire playthrough. To call She Sees Red a video game at all is a bit of a stretch as it far more resembles an interactive movie with real actors and environments instead of digitally rendered characters.

At its core, She Sees Red is an interactive crime-thriller that begins with a murder at a night club owned by a group of shady Russian mobsters. The player must then take on the role of the killer and choose their course of action in order to escape the club without getting caught. On the side of the mobsters, however, a mysterious investigator comes to the club to investigate the homicide and attempts to find the killer as the group work their way through the carnage created by the intruder. As the story progresses, the lines between the two sides becomes more and more vague as new information is found and the characters’ pasts are uncovered.

The gameplay in She Sees Red is actually quite simple as all the player has to do is occasionally react to quick-time events and decide between two options for the character’s course of action. After making your decision, the player is then met with a cinematic scene that corresponds to the action chosen by the player. An example of this might be choosing to fight a guard versus choosing to attempt to sneak past the guard. The purpose in this game is to find as many scenes as possible (which is very attainable considering that each playthrough of the game clocks in at around 30 minutes to an hour), with a total of over 60 to be found. In my first playthrough I discovered just over 20 scenes and was hungry to find more. Honestly, I would say that about three or four playthroughs of the game are necessary for the optimal experience, but it will not feel like a chore as the suspense created by each titillating scene only made me want to delve further into this engrossing mystery. The quick time events can sometimes make the player feel a bit rushed since they pass quickly, but I actually believe that it makes for an overall more immersive and enjoyable experience since it makes it feel as if the stakes for the player are as high as they are for the characters in the “game.”  

The music in She Sees Red was fantastic, always fitting the mood perfectly and progressing the narrative of the story in a very effective way. The direction of the scenes themselves were also quite well done; the lighting, camera angles, and blocking of the scenes were all fantastic and the actors themselves played their roles better than any computer-generated characters that I’ve seen in typical video games. If I could give this game one critique, it would be that the audio did not always match up perfectly with the movement of the actors’ lips and would look a bit odd and would undermine the immersion factor a bit. Otherwise, I could not have been happier with what Rhinotales has created in this spectacular interactive film. 

*Lip-synching in the dubbed version might not be perfect due to the nature of speech patterns in the original Russian language.

Overall, I could not have been happier with this game and was delighted by the result that I was privileged to play. I found very few (nothing other than the audio mismatch actually) errors in She Sees Red and found that it actually far more replay value than I was anticipating. I had a blast on every single playthrough and each time I failed I found myself only wanting to play and learn more about the story presented in this game. Rhinotales  outdid themselves by showing that interactive films can still maintain quality in production, action, and writing. I look forward to seeing more from this development team in the future considering what they achieved with this title. Just remember before playing, gamers, that as the intro to this game states: every decision matters. 

Check Out the She Sees Red Official Trailer:

For more information, please visit: https://rhinotales.com/

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Hayden Vassey

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I've been playing video games since I got a Playstation 2 when I was about 5 or 6 years old. The original Star Wars: Battlefront series and the Spyro series initially ignited my interest in gaming, but it wasn't until I got older that I truly appreciated the subtle details that make video games such a unique form of entertainment. My favorite type of video game would have to be any lengthy and plot-driven open world game, with my favorite games of all time being Batman: Arkham City, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Assassin's Creed: Revelations, and Firewatch.

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