The Complex

I went in expecting Wales Interactive's usual workmanlike FMV output and came out genuinely surprised by how much the writing holds up. The Complex casts you as Dr. Amy Tenant, a nanotechnology specialist who ends up sealed inside a biotech lab after a bio-weapon incident hits London. Every minute you spend in there, the oxygen count is dropping and the trust between you and the people around you is shifting. That pressure is real, and the game earns it. The structural hook is a dual tracking system that sits in the background the whole time. Your relationship scores with each character update in real time, while a separate personality profile logs whether you're playing Amy as brave, honest, aggressive, or somewhere murkier in between. These aren't cosmetic meters. The relationship totals feed directly into which of the eight endings you reach, and a full playthrough runs around 90 minutes, so chasing a new outcome on a second run feels earned rather than tedious. A skip-scene button unlocks for anything you've already watched, which is the right call. One reviewer put in fifteen playthroughs to nail every ending. That's the ceiling, not the floor, but it tells you how much branching the game actually contains across nearly 200 filmed scenes. The writing credit matters here. Lynn Renee Maxcy, part of the Emmy-winning team behind The Handmaid's Tale, scripted the thing, and it shows in the moral texture. The first choice you face - deciding who lives between two patients - lands with real weight because there's no clean answer, and that ambiguity holds across most of the decision points. Critics were split almost perfectly down the middle on the acting: Adventure Gamers scored it in the 90s while PC Gamer landed at 52, with the main disagreement landing squarely on cast performance. Michelle Mylett as Amy is generally praised; Kate Dickie as the pharmaceutical CEO divided reviewers hard. The CGI in a few corridor sequences is visibly underbaked compared to the live-action set work, which is polished and convincingly clinical. What The Complex does exceptionally well for its format is pacing. A Pause Choices mode lets you freeze the timer on decisions, making it genuinely stream-friendly or useful if you're the type who stares at a dialogue option for three minutes. A personality assessment at the end of each run gives you a breakdown across five trait dimensions, which is the kind of small flourish that transforms a single viewing into a reason to ask "what if I'd picked the other thing." Where it stumbles is in some character motivation gaps - a few supporting characters do things that only make full sense after you've seen multiple endings, which can feel confusing rather than mysterious on a first pass. If you've never touched an FMV game, this is a reasonable entry point. It's not demanding, it doesn't require fast reflexes, and the sci-fi thriller premise is accessible enough that you don't need genre fluency. If you're already a Wales Interactive fan who enjoyed Late Shift or The Bunker, The Complex is a clear step up in writing quality even if the overall production sits at a similar level. Anyone expecting conventional game mechanics is going to bounce off this immediately, and that's fine. It knows what it is.

Alex · Scout Team

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