Erica on PS4 - it's ok but it isn't a game

Sometimes I enjoy these interactive experiences but they really need to do a fantastic job with the story in order for that to be the case. Erica was one of the free offerings with a Playstation Plus membership this month and is the only reason why I ended up with it.

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While this game would appeal to people who are really into a super casual experience, i don't really think that actual gamers are going to be extremely stoked about this one because you don't actually control a great deal of it and you merely make choices at certain intervals and this changes how the overall story progresses, even though it always ends up at more or less the same place eventually (there are exceptions, but not many).

All of the action is FMV (full motion video) and at no point in time is the game pad even necessary since you can not control where Erica moves or what happens with any of the other characters in the game.

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If any of your are old enough to remember it this "game" functions in a similar fashion to how *Choose your own Adventure" books worked back in the 80's in that you made choices throughout the story that would affect the overall outcome or even result in an abrupt ending.

To be fair I only did 2 playthroughs, once as a virtuous saint, the next as someone who would make all of what appears to the be wrong decisions throughout including killing any time I had the chance. This resulted in me getting what I later found out was the "easiest" ending. On a second playthrough I made drastically different decisions only to end up in the same place at the end - which was kind of disappointing because it suggests that no matter what you do you are going to end up there.

There are a ton of "trophies" in this game and some of them are extremely difficult to get. One of them which is just called "We Need to Talk" involves making more than 40 choices in the progression of the game that if you do even one of them differently it will not be triggered.

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_{Every minute or so you are given some choices.. most of them don't have much effect on the overall story}

The idea behind this game is good enough but I don't think that the story, nor many of the actors, are good enough to give this title a high rating and this is evident in their meta-critic score of around 6 out of 10. This "game" functions more like that episode of Black Mirror that was interactive only with sub-par acting.

I suppose this is a decent, extremely casual method of killing a few hours without ever really needing to learn anything about controls (sine they are displayed on the screen when needed) so for someone who doesn't actually play games but would still like an interactive experience, this could be ok. Oh, and you can't save your progress and then start over from just before that point to see how your choices affect the outcome, you have to play through the ENTIRE GAME to make a choice differently. This is why I only did 2 playthrough because each one takes several hours and much of the video is going to be exactly the same.

If you have a PS Plus membership you may as well give this a go, but I wouldn't really suggest anyone pay money for this. As an alternative for super-casual games that actually have an extremely compelling story go for What Remains of Edith Finch.