L.A. Noire is a playable game, with a solid Rockstar part of driving through Los Angeles in 1947, including car chases, a bit of shooting, and some fist fights. But its claim to fame was the interrogation sequences, where the player was supposed to select one of three options (true, doubt, lie) in response to motion-captured facial expressions of suspects. A later version of the game changed the names of the three options to good cop, bad cop, and accuse. It didn’t help. It turns out that lie detection through reading facial expressions doesn’t work any better in a video game than in real life, even if you ask your actors to exaggerate. Different people interpret the same facial expression differently. And even if you were pretty sure that the suspect wasn’t saying the truth, it wasn’t always that clear whether doubt or lie was the best response. Youtube is still full of videos giving the right responses to every single interrogation, because the average player just failed this central task half of the time.

It doesn’t help that guessing right or wrong doesn’t matter. L.A. Noire is very linear, and even major career events like getting promoted or demoted happen at fixed points in the story, regardless how well or badly you are doing in solving cases. Given the age of the game I think I can spoiler the fact that you are actually forced to put the wrong men in prison for a series of killings that are actually the work of a serial killer. Even if you know, you get no agency, no option to do it otherwise. In my personal opinion, L.A. Noire is not a very good game, and the facial expression reading not working for many players is a major reason for that.

Now I might seem a bit harsh on that. But then consider that every single feature of every single Rockstar game has been copied by other games over the years. Usually with lower production values, and thus lower success. But I don’t know of any game that copied the interrogation game mechanic from L.A. Noire. It seems that even game designers more talented at copying than inventing new game mechanics didn’t consider this one as a good idea.