Developer: Wales Interactive
Publisher: Wales Interactive
Year: 2023
Genre: Interactive Movie

Unfortunately I am on my FMV bullshit again, and that means looking through the games I have access to and playing as many as I can until I get burnt out on the medium and go back to playing normal games. This time it’s Mia and the Princess Dragon, an interactive movie by Wales Interactive. I’ve played one or two of these by the studio before and didn’t really enjoy them because I had felt you were making branching decisions with no idea how they would go, and then you get a bad ending and have to restart the whole game with no ability to skip what you had seen before. This was how Late Shift worked, a game a lot of people seemed to like from Steam reviews but I thought was pretty bad. However, I am sucker for FMV and Doctor Who, and this is a game starring the 8th Doctor, Paul McGann, so here I am playing this interactive movie.

On a side note, I will take every opportunity I can to recommend the 8th Doctor audio dramas by Big Finish. They’re fantastic and the Doctor gets to actually have character development. Storm Warning is the first one and a solid place to start, but Chimes of Midnight is fantastic and also a good first one. If you live in the US, you can also check out some of these for free through the Hoopla app if your library has it.

You play as Mia, a barmaid working at a dive bar, when a woman who is unable to speak English shows up and is on the run from a group of thugs led by Paul McGann. Pretty quickly it starts throwing decisions at you where you make binary choices. It will show you stats when making decisions but doesn’t give you context for it. You can pause it to see what the stats actually are. I never could tell what these were actually used for and as far as I could tell, they did not seem to have an impact on the story.

Some of the choices made no sense or felt meaningless. Early on in the game you can escape the bar you’re trapped at and leave with the mysterious woman, and get out before the more people arrive, and then your character decides to come back after eating and gets stuck in another situation and it felt like some very important context was missing because we weren’t there. At another point a cannon is aimed at someone and you can choose between warning the friend or stopping the person at the cannon. After you make this decision, someone walks up and stabs the friend anyway. I know this is something that is just going to happen with interactive stories that use FMV, because you can only film so much on a small budget and have to make compromises at certain points, but when it’s so transparent that the choice does not matter, don’t even offer it.

I’m dumping on the game quite a bit but there were parts I liked too. The game features a decision tree, which shows you what scenes you’ve seen before and the whole branching layout of the game. I actually liked the decision tree a lot. It’s probably a big spoiler if you looked at it before playing and it probably destroys the magic of how the game functions for some people but I found it to be really interesting. It showed me that there was more going on than I initially thought and was less linear than I had assumed. It was just interesting to look at and see how one of these games is laid out. The game actually lets you skip scenes you’ve seen before, unlike Late Shift. So I could actually replay the game without feeling frustrated. I will bag on Late Shift every chance I get, sorry. It also didn’t sort the choices into a good and bad decision. Well maybe it did a little, but it mostly tried to sort the game into two different but hopefully interesting choices for you to pick.

Mia and the Dragon Princess was also a lot lighter and more fun in tone than that game. It knew what kind of story it was and just felt like it was trying to have fun. The cast was perfectly fine. I’m sure it was a paycheck job for Paul McGann but he was fine. This wasn’t a Dennis Hopper in Black Dahlia situation.

So would I actually recommend it? I don’t know. I had a better time with it than some of the other interactive movies by the studio. It felt a lot sloppier than some other Wales games but also a lot less frustrating since the choices weren’t funneled between good and bad and it was easy to replay the game to try other branches. So far I feel like my impression with the studio’s games, the ones they’ve developed and weren’t just the publisher on, is that the ones that don’t take themselves too seriously are more fun to play and are maybe worth considering if you see them in a bundle or on sale and know that you’re getting yourself into An Interactive Movie that will last you an hour or two and that’s it. It’s not really a ringing endorsement but I’ve played worse ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Mia and the Dragon Princess is available on a variety of platforms you can find on the developer’s site.