I'm going to start off by making a point of the fact that I do not like Fahrenheit. Not because it's necessarily a bad game, but more because it didn't interest me much at all (in fact, one of my favourite parts was that you could play Theory of a Deadman (they're a good band) on the stereo system in Lucas's apartment), and because I find the gameplay mechanic itself painful and tedious.
However, in the sake of fairness, I will try and keep my judgement of the game neutral.
Fahrenheit labels itself as an 'interactive film', and not a game, which in the first place, should suggest that the choices you can pick will not carry a lot of weight - as a film, while not always, tends to follow a linear storyline, which Fahrenheit does. The game hypes itself up, offering interactivity and multiple endings - only the interactivity, 90% of the time, is in the form of extremely long, extremely tedious quick time events. Some of these events don't even have a point, aside from stopping the player from having to sit through a long cutscene - which, I believe was intended to keep the player immersed in the game, only this method falls flat in execution.
The 'multiple endings' are three, near identical endings, only differing a minuscule amount, and mostly in a few changes lines of dialogue.
The choices which lead to these 'differing' endings, do not feel meaningful in the slightest. Most of the time, our choices are mostly in terms of dialogue, requiring the player to pick the correct line of enquiry quickly, in order to receive the most out of the story - and, as I noticed during my playthrough of this game, often offers the ignored/not chosen answer or choice, up again later, or gives the answer without our choice. When you receive both options after getting asked to pick one or the other, is there really any point in picking in the first place? Your choice in this scenario merely dictates which order you learn new information in, and does little to change the story, or even make it feel like you are in charge of this narrative.
For example, right near the end of the game, we find out Carla and Lucas have fallen 'in love'. I say 'in love', as such, because there was little to no build up or reasoning for this development, and personally found this extremely forced, and incredibly hard to believe. However, my point here is that we have no choice in this matter. No matter how much I had made, or wanted to make Carla distrust and blame Lucas, she always wound up with him - as if my input had been completely ignored, for the sake of the narrative being presented to us.
Some choices offered in the game felt slightly more clear - like saving the boy who had fallen into the ice, or leaving him. I made a decision, and recieved immediate payoff for doing so. However, this feeling did not last long - as neither choice I made here changed the game, or story at all. In fact, the only choice I would argue made any difference to the story at all, would be the choice for Tyler to stay with the police, or leave with Sam, as this directly changes his life - but even then, it doesn't seem to matter at all which I pick, because either way, you never encounter either again in the story.
Nothing I tried to do in the story felt at all meaningful, no matter how hard I tried.
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