Voyeur

Voyeur is one of the boldest titles ever released for the Philips CD-i, and it also best shows what its creators had in mind by the term "interactive film." The player sits in an apartment facing the mansion of a powerful politician, Reed Hawke, and uses a camera to observe the windows of his house. The task is to record incriminating material before a murder takes place. The whole game runs in real time, divided into time slots during which scenes play out in various rooms. It is never possible to see everything at once, so progress means repeatedly going through the same evening and searching for moments that fit together. The footage gathered is then presented as evidence.

Technically, it's a grand showcase of what the disc could do: the game consists almost entirely of live-action video with professional actors, among whom Robert Culp stands out in the role of the main villain. The editing, the music, and the darkly lit interiors create the mood of an eighties thriller, with the one difference that the viewer themselves decides where to look. The video resolution is, understandably, low and the picture grainy, but that oddly reinforces the sense of secretly watching from a distance.

At the time, the game was much talked about because of its erotic and violent content, which clearly marked it as a title for adult audiences only. Critics praised its ambition and its cast, with reservations aimed at how repeatedly watching the same scenes drags on, and at how the interaction is limited to choosing a window. The game was later ported to computers and released for other systems. Today it is interesting above all as an attempt at a genuinely different format: a blend of detective story, espionage, and surveillance narrative that the game industry has rarely attempted since. The idea that the player pieces together the truth from fragments of other people's conversations and decides for themselves what to pay attention to at any given moment fully returned only many years later, in independent detective games.