Grey's Anatomy: The Video Game Review

I have a bit of an odd experience with the ABC medical drama Grey’s Anatomy; I’ve watched a decent chunk of the show, but I’ve never actually sat down with the intention of watching it. It’s always just been on while someone else was watching it, and I joined because I didn’t exactly have anything better to do. That’s not to say I hold any particular dislike for the show — I tend to rather enjoy medical dramas — but that I know a decent bit about the show despite not caring about it all that much. For the uninitiated, Grey’s Anatomy follows Dr. Meredith Grey as she starts her medical career as an intern and then grows into a more and more accomplished doctor at the fictional Seattle Grace Hospital, with a wide supporting cast around with plenty of their own issues and subplots. There also happens to be a lot of romance afoot, with particular attention paid to the growing relationship between Meredith and one of the higher-ups in the hospital, McDreamy (admittedly, he does have an actual name, but I find the “McDreamy” moniker too silly not to use, so he will be referred to as such during this review).

With all that in mind, when I saw that not only was there a Grey’s Anatomy videogame but that its 15th anniversary was coming up, I knew there was only one thing I could do… write a review 15 years too late.

Grey’s Anatomy: The Video Game, developed by Longtail Studios (now known as Ubisoft Halifax) in 2009, is a title that is best described as either a very simple puzzle game or a fully voice-acted set of scenes frequently interrupted by mini-games. It takes place roughly during season four of the long-running drama, so most of the original cast is still around and already have a lot of history with each other. This is certainly a blessing for anyone already familiar with the show, as none of the five “episodes” the game is split into focus on reintroducing the characters and their relationships, instead allowing them to develop alongside the story. However, for anyone unfamiliar with the characters, there’s not a lot of effort made to ensure that all of the important information is available. Much can be gleaned through context, but I can’t really judge that aspect too well, as I already knew some of the details before going in.

The story itself is generally pretty interesting; the first episode sees a few plotlines play out as normal, but it ends with a patient coming in and throwing up blood in a hallway. This signals a turn towards an overarching diphtheria outbreak that threatens to spread across the hospital, thereby bringing in the CDC (the US’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) to lock down the place, leaving all 2000 people still inside to deal with the highly infectious disease. While that plays out, the existing storylines have to bend around the issue as already turbulent relationships threaten to explode under the pressure of quarantine. Can Meredith and McDreamy’s relationship survive all the secrets they reveal to and keep from each other? Will Dr. Christina Yang be selected to go on a career-changing fellowship and also manage to deal with an incredibly flirty nurse? There are even a small handful of plots that don’t revolve around romance, though the majority of them are absolutely focused on that.

There is, however, an issue with the story. No, it’s not that the characters themselves are terribly written — while some moments of character or relationship development seem overly quick or forced, it’s never to a ridiculous point. The problem is that the dialogue scenes don’t ever really get a chance to breathe; they are constantly interrupted by mini-games. Usually, these are either meant to help the characters in their social lives and push themselves to do things, though there are also many that represent surgery and other medical work. The issue is that they are too frequent, often shoved in unnecessarily, range wildly between too easy and unfair, and just sort of pause the story until the mini-game is finished.

Now, I likely shouldn’t be complaining about there being too much “game” in this videogame, but I still find it frustrating that there’s very little effort here to actually integrate the story and gameplay together. I mean, some of the mini-games, like the one where you throw thought clouds against each other to clear a character’s mind, can be pretty fun, but most of them feel more like chores. I never really feel like I’m playing out being a doctor (or a stressed-out person in a relationship making terrible decisions), but instead, like I’m watching Grey’s Anatomy and frequently pausing the show to match different orbs together or recreating a character out of puzzle pieces. Heck, it wouldn’t even be all that bad if every scene didn’t end with a pop-up saying you completed the scene. The game is already split into five episodes, each with six acts that themselves have their own six scenes. Only showing the results at the end of each act instead of each scene might have gone a long way toward making those scenes flow together better. After all, the space between acts is typically used for ad breaks in television; why not put the results screens there?

Admittedly, that might have made the game significantly harder, as each scene is graded on a five-point scale where you lose one point for every mini-game you fail to complete; if you lose all five points, you must restart the scene. A shift to using this five-point scale on a per-act structure could make the game annoying for anyone struggling with it. However, most of the mini-games are incredibly easy, and the cheaply difficult ones are spread out wide enough that this wouldn’t actually make too big of an impact on the difficulty while being a huge help to the overall pacing. Of course, the mini-games’ poor integration would still be an issue, but without having a results screen every minute, they would become far more forgivable.

Beyond that, I do want to discuss those mini-games in a bit more detail, though there isn’t exactly a lot to cover: the mini-games that represent social actions are generic and often simplistic — there are even two different types of puzzles that amount to tearing pictures in half — and those that represent surgery play like a boring, chopped up version of Trauma Center. Thankfully, the difficulty does ramp up over time in fairly organic ways, like how new obstacles get introduced in the “put the emotion circle in a hole” mini-game or how suturing comes to involve making more complex shapes: however, some get more difficult in unfair ways. The matching objects one, for instance, will outright refuse to give you sets of objects that come in threes as the story goes on, so playing them can be more of an exercise in trying them until they let you win instead of actually coming to a solution.

One cool detail is that some of these mini-games also double as dialogue choices, where there are two solutions and whichever one you go for changes how a given character responds to a situation. Admittedly, this only seems to make a difference for a couple of lines, but it’s an interesting idea.

The animation is less interesting and less impressive, even by 2009 standards. I wouldn’t really call the character models awful (because I’ve seen worse), but half the cast don’t even look all that similar to their real-life counterparts, a problem compounded by the fact that, to my knowledge, none of the show’s actors returned to voice their characters. The performances, thankfully, sound close enough to my vague memories of the show, so I was usually able to recognise people, but some characters really threw me for a loop. Beyond that, though, the models seem to have a hard time properly emoting, with a lot of subtle acting details easily getting lost. There were several moments throughout the story where I had to figure out how a given event was meant to be portrayed through the dialogue rather than with my eyes.

I admit that the new story is rather engaging — though there are a few elements that make my eyes roll, like how an overly flirty nurse becomes an actual romantic interest for one character, and there are also several weaknesses with the ending that I won’t get into here — but I struggle to see how the mini-game structure really helps to make this work as a game or a story. I can’t help but think that this may have worked better as some sort of Trauma Center/Telltale-style adventure game hybrid. At least then, the most engaging aspect of Grey’s Anatomy: The Video Game would’ve been more centred, and the gameplay aspects might’ve felt more integrated. All in all, this just seems like a poor way to translate the show into a videogame format and leaves little to be desired.