Alfred Hitchcock Vertigo Nintendo Switch Review 4/10 “VertigNo” 🕵️‍♂️ @pendulostudios #IndieGames #GameDev

I had a plan when this game was released, I had promised myself this year to watch more Hitchcock movies, and so before I played Vertigo, I would sit down and watch the film version first - and then dive straight into the game. I hoped that by watching the original source material I would enrich my gaming experience by having a fuller picture and understanding how this game embodies the film on which it is based.

I can say that watching the film Vertigo didn’t really help. The game doesn’t follow the plot at all, it takes a couple of aspects but changes them heavily which isn’t a bad thing, per se. The game tries to have a Hitchcockian vibe and incorporate the ‘master of suspense’ style into many aspects of the game. This is a huge undertaking, and the game never gets near hitting the heights of Hitchcock or Vertigo.

Vertigo follows Ed Miller, who has been in a recent car accident. He claims that his wife and daughter were with him, but the police can find no evidence of this. He is now suffering from Vertigo and is also bed-bound. A psychotherapist named Dr Lomar is brought in to help Ed and to get to the truth of what really happened. 

The first thing I want to note is that Ed Miller is one of the most unpleasant characters I’ve ever played as, he is snarky, derogatory and very unhelpful - the reasons why get explained later, but when going through the early parts of the game - he is unbearable.

The story starts with great intrigue and a definite mystery - which for the first hour is kept up - but as it goes on, massive cracks start to form. The pace is glacial, Vertigo takes about 10-12 hours and I think only two of them I would dub as ‘interesting’ - the first and last hour, so much of the game feels stretched and formed of the worst aspects of adventure games, it feels like you meander around waiting for something exciting to happen.

Very heavy themes are brought up in the story and I really don’t feel they did them any justice or even due care, such a theme is literally thrown in about a minute before the end of the game as a way to explain a character’s possible motivation and it’s almost unbelievable how heavy-handed it is. 

 The most interesting part of Vertigo is the hypnosis sections where Ed will go through what happened and then Lomar will put him under hypnosis and you will scan the timeline of events and explore what actually happened, it does effectively mean you’re doing things twice, but the realisations of what happened instead of Ed’s distortions are enough to justify it.

The problem isn’t doing sections twice - it’s that the gameplay is slow and lacklustre. Your movement and action speeds are slow, loading times are frequent and long, and the puzzles are just fetching an object and then using it - it all feels uninspired. You are given choices that don’t mean anything, as the game plays out the same way no matter what you choose.

The technical aspects are where the game really hits lows, facial animations are awkward and stilted, the mouth does not match the dialogue in any way, I’ve seen ‘90s budget pc games with more accurate mouth animations, the voice acting is jilted and lines don’t feel like they naturally follow each other, the audio overall goes up and down. The game is simply a janky mess.

There are a couple of positives, I mentioned previously how much I found Ed Miller completely insufferable, well - by the end of the game I did have a bit of sympathy for him, so that’s one tiny bit of triumph for the story. A few of the camera angles had a touch of Hitchcock about them, and the music did feel very much like it captured the scores of his work.