I’ve been playing quite a lot of LA Noire lately. I’m enjoying it immensely. The story line, arcs, and episodic case structure are all remarkable good, and it’s a very playable game. (Inconsequential or very mild spoilers may follow.)

There’s a huge amount to enjoy about LA Noire. As Charlie Brooker said recently, it’s ‘the triumphant return of the adventure game’. I like the setting, there’s plenty to explore in the glamourous, indulgent sleaze of post-war Los Angeles. The story is also very good. Having completed my homicide assignment and now transferred into the vice squad, I’m about half-way in. The slowly unravelling corruption going on around Cole Phelps (your character in the game) is growing in intrigue, and the war flashback cut scenes to his backstory are also quite interesting.

Here’s the thing, though. The very fact that the player’s character has a backstory is a problem. There’s a dark past to be uncovered, and he has an unbalanced temperament (enhanced by the game’s lack of predictability when doubting a witness during interviews and interrogation, and also his apparent habit of aggressively pushing pedestrians to the ground if you accidentally walk into them.) Whilst he’s generally more restrained and patient than any of the colleagues you’re partnered with, he is also a man of 1947 this plays out in his dialogue and treatment of other characters (both in social and police professional attitudes.)

As the player, I keep finding myself at odds with this pattern. When my partner punches a witness, I’m personally unhappy at his methods, but Cole Phelps just gapes on. My attitudes as the player don’t map to the game, so I’m watching the game play out rather than leading it.

##I’m Sam Tyler, helpless on a sofa.

What’s really going on is that the game has transported me, a cosmopolitan, conscientious, and socially aware individual of the twenty-first century, into a time of backwards attitudes, malpractice, inappropriate police behaviour, and classic automobiles. In every one of those respects, I find it remarkably analogous to the magnificent BBC police drama ‘Life on Mars’. You should watch it, it’s only two series (sixteen episodes) and I almost applauded the ending in my own living room.

Modern day police officer Sam Tyler is hit by a car in 2006 and wakes up in 1973, memories and attitudes intact, and still a police officer in the equivalent Manchester department. The story is partly the exposition and mystery around what exactly is going on with his apparent time travel scenario, but also how this modern, proper man handles working in a police force of corruption, sexism, and racism, carrying guns and a blasé attitude toward assaulting their suspects. Sam Tyler is constantly at odds with the behaviour of his peers, just as I am with pretty much everyone in LA Noire. The difference being not just that I can’t intervene, but that the actions of my own character are from this alien time as well. I’m just sat here, watching in mild horror as my avatar clumsily and inexplicably aggressively accuses a grieving husband of murdering his wife, when all I really wanted was to gently prod him on the coincidence of muddy boots and a conspicuously absent piece of rope.

It’s a separation of player and actor that shapes a different kind of enjoyment from the game than might have been. It’s like watching a TV show more than playing a game. In each case there’s a big title, exposition of the larger arc, there’s some left-field backstory build up. Each successful investigation leaves me satisfied like watching a good weekly episode. Of course there’s extra enjoyment when you make the whole thing more efficient by piecing together some more obscure clues, but it’s still just repetition of a good formula.

It’s a third person perspective adventure game that starkly leaves you feeling the third person looking in. The game is good because the story it’s telling is well written, the characters are well acted, and it’s enjoyable to ‘watch’. But the more I play it, the more I think it would be an awful lot more engrossing to play myself in a ‘Life on Mars’ game instead.