Published by Rockstar Games

Rated “M” for Mature

Contains Blood and Gore, Nudity, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, Use of Drugs, and Violence

When it’s done really well a police procedural can be a true masterpiece of crime fiction. You know what the detective is thinking, you’re included in the mental work, and get to follow along through every aspect of the investigation where’s there’s no priority given to the dramatic over the mundane. Done poorly and you’ll want to gnaw your own arm off. L.A. Noire does it with mastery, uncovering a story you’ll carry in your thoughts for days, months, even years.

The game is built on the foundation of the Grand Theft Auto series. You work your way through a career in crime, but this time behind the badge instead of in front of it. You commander cars instead of stealing them, finish shoot-outs instead of starting them, and chase after the bad guys instead of running from the police.

The focus is no longer on out-of-control situations and excessive, foaming-at-the-mouth egomaniacs, but instead on carefully measured plans of cruelty and creepy authority figures with a disturbing sense of human evil. There’s a powerful moment when Dr. Harlon Fontaine, a psychiatrist so slithery his very words seem to invade under your skin, delivers a chilling, nervous laugh that is somehow more gruesome than any bloodied chainsaw.

Crime scene investigations and interrogations make up the main detective work and are presented as new game elements.

Punches aren’t pulled with the visceral details. You’ll find yourself straddling a naked corpse across a set of railroad tracks, turning over lesions and ligature marks while the coroner stands nearby delivering revealing insights. Each body is surrounded by a scene so well set in detail and convincing realism as to be beautiful in its own way and your task is to poke and prod as you walk about, looking for clues that grab your attention through vibrations or audio cues. Some are worth turning over in your hands, others not. Thankfully everything is recorded for you in a notepad to refer to later on.

This is the 1940’s, so there’s no forensics, no DNA, no computers. Everything is hands-on and simple footwork. If you need an address you’ll have to call the station and have someone look it up for you. It takes even longer to get a warrant and so even more important that you simply charge your way into whatever place you need to be.

The interrogations are as much about lie detection as they are about the back-and-forth of getting answers. New facial animation technology allows actors to share their expressions as much as their voices with astonishing subtlety. The idea is to communicate tells and micro-expressions; looking away, showing annoyance or anger, or simply closing their eyes while speaking. The hope is that it’s realistic enough that you can pick up on whether they’ve giving a false statement or not, just by watching them.

The judgement process asks you to pick a topic from a list, they respond, and you have to decide if they are telling the truth. You can select “truth”, “doubt”, or “lie”. Guess wrong and you won’t get the information needed to complete the case and you’ll have to restart. The twist is that in order to choose the “lie” option you’ll need to have a clue from a crimescene to back it up.

While the crime scenes are fascinating to play out, the interrogations can be tiresome. As the game advances in difficulty I found that it became harder to understand just what you’re supposed to detect a lie in. Some cases ask you to make a choice before they even reveal what the true topic is.

What keeps them interesting is the acting performances the new technology allows. The casting is superb, pulling in a long list of talented actors from film and television. You won’t know their name, but you do know their work and for the first time in a game you’ll recognize their acting as much as their face.

Aaron Statton plays the main role of detective Cole Phelps with subtle complexity, as a man who shows great conviction when processing a case, but less so off it. Rival detective Roy Earle may have a give-away crooked smile, but Adam John Harrington portrays him convincingly as someone who might still be on your side, somehow.

What I admire most about L. A. Noire is its story, by Brendan McNamara, and the way it handles the seemingly stereotypical issues of corruption, prejudice, idealism, and betrayal.

We follow Phelps throughout his career, as he advances through the different divisions of patrol, traffic, arson, homicide, and vice, with each delivering a different partner, a different world of crime puzzles, and most effectively, a more elaborate piece for the greater conspiracy you know is about. The way in which each of those pieces falls in place is masterful, and the pay-off at the end is both unpredictable and satisfying, more so than most movies or books. I can only think it’s the twenty hour length that must help do such a large a complex tale justice.

As Phelps moves from case to case we’re given flashbacks from his time as a marine in World War II. As the story unfolds we begin to meet other men from his unit, now living new lives in the same city, and an interesting thing happens. As the investigator we follow Phelps seems like the man with the best judgement of the world, but in a shift that occurs later we get see things from the view of one of his fellow marines, the perspective changes and suddenly it seems like someone else has the better sense of things. Phelps’ world view, then becomes the one that is less clear.

I love the way corruption is depicted, not as a speech-giving villains looking for more power, but as a conspiracy by those with the advantage who feel it gives them the right to exploit others at any cost. In that approach I’d hold it up against “Chinatown”, one of the films it’s clearly inspired by.

L. A. Noire is more art than entertainment, a thoughtful and sometimes demanding game designed to serve a story, first and foremost. It does so effectively and, for those who push through to the end, with immense satisfaction.