Although brief, Hello Stranger is a fun enough FMV game with some neat moments and a solid premise.
Choice-driven Full Motion Video games, or FMVs if you’re cool like I am, often have the problem of seeming to offer a lot of choice but in reality have very few of them mean anything. Old fashioned choose-your-own adventure books could get around this easily enough, but when you end up having to film a whole bunch of different movies to stitch together I can imagine there’s a significant amount of complexity. Hello Stranger does nothing to deal with this, but the small scale of the story means that it isn’t really much of an issue, and whilst I would like more to be done with the premise, I enjoyed what was presented to me for the most part.
You play as Cam, a twenty-something man living in his smart home with his AI Sasha. It seems that Cam rarely leaves his apartment, and spends most of his time there working on his own business and playing games. One thing he likes to do in his spare time is go on the titular programme Hello Strange, a Chatroulette-like service that connects you with random people for video chats. Obviously though, this is the internet, so things go wrong for Cam quite quickly when he comes across a chat partner who manages to hack his smart home and traps him in a deadly online game.
Now, Hello Stranger is a game based on choices, but you’ll still end up hitting these key points regardless of what decisions you make. This is the case with most games of this type, but due to how short the game is — clocking in at around thirty minutes for a full playthrough — and the personality Cam seems to have, this kind of makes a lot of sense. As someone who never seems to leave his flat, it makes sense that he would eventually stumble his way into this situation regardless of what happens. The illusion of choice isn’t really broken here, and I can see what the structure of the story is going for.
Cam is forced to decide his fate at several junctures, in which choices of games are presented to him. These range from memory and maths puzzles, to actual playable video games, simplistic though they are. Should Cam fail, you’ll be treated to an often amusingly silly death sequence for him, something that I enjoyed hunting down during my play time. Succeed though, and you’ll move onto the next game. Should you succeed three times, you’ll be free and receive one of the game’s ten endings.
By pure chance, I got what I would describe as the true ending the first time around. What’s interesting though is that I got the feeling that I really wasn’t meant to see this on my first playthrough as it didn’t really make a lot of sense, especially with the plot twist. I think you’re meant to get a few different endings first before getting to the point I arrived at so that everything clicks into place. The ending felt much better once I had a few more runs. The inclusion of the ability to skip scenes you’ve already experienced was nice, as was the very generous checkpointing that would allow you to continue after a death with little consequence. I was more than happy that I didn’t have to play through the whole thing again to reach the same point.
The acting is solid enough throughout, though some might feel like there’s a bit of scenery chewing going on. This strangely fits with the plot once you reach the end, so it can be overlooked somewhat. I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard Shakespearean acting legend Derek Jacobi in the opening moments of the game though. What an absolute get for such an under-the-radar game! The presentation on the whole was actually very good. Cam’s sleek apartment was quite fitting for the character that we’re presented with, and considering pretty much the entire game takes place in it it provided a nice visual throughout.
Hello Stranger isn’t going to redefine the FMV genre, but it is a fun entry into it and one that’s worth a look for fans. Its brief runtime lends itself well to replays, and there are some genuinely funny scenes in there that highlight the very British sense of humour that this game has. At under a tenner, it would be hard to complain too much about picking this one up.
Hello Stranger is available now on PC.
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