The Fidelio Incident

The Fidelio Incident describes itself as a single-player, first-person thriller set off the coast of Iceland, inspired by Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio. Genre-wise it sits in good company, with the likes of Gone Home and Firewatch and, to a lesser extent, Dear Esther.

Stanley and his wife Leonore have an unfortunate aviation mishap and we find ourselves in Stanley's shoes amidst the burning wreckage of a plane in the cold, deadly and beautiful wilderness of a fictionalised Iceland. At face value the story of the game is simple: find Leonore. However, at the core of the game lies an attempt at telling a deeper story through a study of Stanley's past and his ultimate redemption.

Gameplay is simple and to the point. You need to walk towards a nearby mountain where Stanley's wife is trapped, pick up journal entries narrated by Leonore that fill us in on our protagonist's backstory, accumulate sparse items such as a flashlight, keycards, icepicks and valve handles to aid us through gated sections, all while trying to survive the harsh elements by sprinting between burning wreckages or open geysers.

The game has very light puzzle elements in the form of the aforementioned valve handles. Stanley needs to open and close valves in order for warm steam to melt a path, so he can move ever forward towards his trapped spouse. The solutions are generally very obvious and serve only the purpose of foregoing the dreaded "walking simulator" tag that's all too generously applied to games in this genre. Only once did we get slightly stuck with a combination lock and after finding the illogical solution Stanley himself commented: "how the hell?"

Throughout the game one will find several signs outlining the steps of hypothermia and, in the latter half of the experience, the game starts blurring the lines between delusion and reality as Stanley is confronted with some of the ghosts from his past, this because of his hypothermic state.

And that's where the game, unfortunately, starts to fall apart. The reliance on the heavy backstory takes away from the immediacy of survival. The feeling of dread melts away because the game's struggles are, in the end, a metaphor for Stanley coming to terms with his past and his relationship with Leonore. One stops playing the game to see the happy couple reunited, and instead, you trudge forward between setpieces trying to piece together a story not directly related to the actual gameplay. It doesn't help that some of the puzzle elements feel less realistic and more fantastical than others, such as an impossibly localised hailstorm, or swathes of bugs that need to be cleared out with steam, in what otherwise felt like a realistic struggle for survival.

The game looks fantastic (as was to be expected what with the game being developed in Unreal Engine 3, and helmed by Ken Feldman, the art director of God of War III) and takes place in a setting that borrows elements from some of the most iconic and beautiful scenery in the world. The audio design is, for the most part, exemplary, and another area where the game shines is the voice acting of the two characters, where actors Glenn Keogh and Bess Harrison breathe life into their lines, which really pulls you into the experience.

Clocking in at around two hours, The Fidelio Incident has a lot going for it in terms of uniqueness, aesthetics and story. Unfortunately, these strong elements don't quite manage to hold the momentum through until the end, and it gets a bit trapped between a narrative story and interesting albeit simple gameplay that doesn't quite fit together.