Not Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, notably. In case you were wondering. That hyphen is the MALK of game titles. The title screen has a lengthy legal attribution for the holding company that handles Hitchcock's estate.

I bought this off GOG on a lark for three bucks, not knowing what I was getting into. I didn't expect an adaptation of the movie, but beyond that, who knows. I was surprised to learn, upon hitting install, that this nothing Alfred Hitchcock game of which no one's heard was a whopping 20 gigs. The possibility of cryptominers crossed my mind. That hasn't yet been ruled out definitively, but much of the explanation is: it's a cinematic choice game, in the style of the Dark Pictures and Supermassive's other stuff.

It begins with the main character waking up on a shore below a bridge. In horrified realization, he scrambles up to a nearby bridge, where a gentleman dressed like Jimmy Stewart's character from the movie - the panicked MC calls to him as his father - is about to jump off.

Now: the title sequence is marked by several logos from animation companies I don't recognize as being active in game development, including a cartooning school. It is clear that the devs are going for an intensive, emotive, character-based experience, except expressed through cartoony CG characters instead of mocapped, photorealistic ones. The animations, um, don't really have what it takes, expression-wise, to carry this. You can tell they're going for something nuanced, but the animators...just don't have what it takes to achieve it.

Despite his son's (?) attempts, Jimmy Stewart jumps, and upon seeing a car overturned at the bottom of the bridge, the main character attempts to follow him. (They do use the famous camera trick from the bell tower in the film when the character looks off the bridge, in case you're wondering.) He is stopped from suicide by a random heroic trucker. Silent Hill Origins came to mind, but the trucker has a very Ride to Hell look, which I tried to but could not capture, as the game causes the capture feature to lag for several seconds.

We then cut to this woman in a theatre. There are popcorn-eating QTEs. There are also numerous prompts to answer your phone in the theatre, which I tried to ignore, but the game won't proceed unless you answer them. Apparently, the woman is a therapist, receiving emergency calls from patients. With her profession's trademark emotional intelligence, she proceeds both to inconvenience her fellow moviegoers and ignore her clients' needs, continually picking up and playing with her phone but refusing to answer messages.

OK, now: I know this is California. And there are certain games that would have the cred to spend to ask you to take Minnie Castavet as a serious and credible psychotherapist. This is not one of them.

Eventually, some time after her movie concludes, Minnie walks in to see the guy from the opening, chilling on a bed shirtless. They conduct their initial therapist-patient interview ("Doctor in what, exactly, Doctor?"). Here is a transcript of their conversation:

Doctor: How do you feel right now?
Guy: Pretty fucking shitty. Like when some idiot comes and pours salt on your wound, hm?
Doctor: If you're only going to give me an hour...it could at least be a fruitful one?
Guy: (pauses) ...Shitty? Does shitty work for you?
Doctor: Keep going.
Guy: Okay. I'll keep going. Shitty, shitty, shitty, shitty, shitty, and shitty. Got that?

This character is supposed to be a writer.

Speaking of which: we in time flash back to the character's past as a writer, in his home, where he uses a memory of his own words during a book tour public radio interview (on which, perhaps not understanding the purpose of "self promotion," he is being a complete asshole) to cure himself of what he describes as a years-long (???) bout of writer's block. Here is the masterpiece passage his breakthrough produces:

OK, so in addition to animation, writing is also a problem. (The diary segments from Tender Loving Care were not far from my mind.)

An off-screen comment from the soon-to-be-introduced hiker, not kitty here.

His masterpiece is interrupted, however, by some yowling from downstairs: he has been neglecting to feed his cat. Actually neglecting, not "my meows are lies" neglecting. Angered and put-upon that his cat requires sustenance to survive, he furiously rises from his seat and trudges downstairs for an onerous ten-second interruption. How could he have known, though, really. After all, out of all the breeds, he's chosen the notoriously quiet and compliant Siamese.

He's then further interrupted by a knock at the door - the zombie-looking woman from the holding company title logo. She's an injured hiker in search of help, and this is supposed to be a meet cute. Unfortunately, the animators have given her a skeletal face with bedraggled gray hair and eye makeup & shading choices that only accentuate the ghoulish look. The head-to-toe gray costuming only makes things worse. I would say that none of this would have gotten past stage one at a studio with more experience in games, but all of this should be utterly glaring to a cartoonist at well.

The ankle is bleeding, and you're given one of four options to respond. I went with "It hurts just to look at it," in an attempt to express some sympathy of what did look like a nasty injury (I mean, it's a pretty bad sprain if it's bleeding). Unfortunately, "sympathy" and "normal human emotion" are alien to the protag, so he interpreted this in his own unique way:

I don't know yet if the woman is going to chomp his carotid artery in her ongoing quest for BRAAAAIIIIINS, but if she did, she'd save us all further pain.