Shenmue 3 review – a return to slow pleasures

Kickstarter funded a third instalment of this much-loved 80s murder mystery, but it's not all middle-aged nostalgia

For a moment in 1999, Shenmue represented the future of all video games. And in some ways, Sega's grand murder mystery, set in late-80s Japan, has defined the medium. With a reported budget of $20m and a supporting battalion of artists, designers and programmers, it was the first game to show that video-game publishers could make financial wagers at Hollywood blockbuster-scale. Likewise, Shenmue's star director, Yu Suzuki, then in his early 40s, laid a template that has defined the games that dominate today's charts: a living virtual city filled with diversions and populated by AI-controlled characters that worked to daily routines; shops that opened to defined schedules; a world that strained at the seams of its technological circumstance.

Still, while Shenmue came with a cinematic plot - you play as a young Japanese man, Ryo Hazuki, trying to disentangle the threads of his father's murder - its slow-burn rhythm was almost art-house in pace. Suzuki later said his aim was to replicate not realism, but reality, with all of its periods of listlessness and boredom. As such, the game was filled with daily chores, repetitious part-time work, all the stuff that, ostensibly, people play video games to escape. The gamble did not pay off. Only two of the planned six instalments in the series were released. Grand Theft Auto 3's arrival in 2001, with its cinematic set pieces and celebrity voice actors, changed the arc of video game design, probably inevitably. The market decided Shenmue's vision of the future was too quirky, and consequently the murder of Ryo's father went unresolved.