It's the commonplace settings, the mundane surroundings of Indigo Prophecy that provide the power behind its punch.

This isn't a game that delivers an experience steeped in fantasy or fiction, or a story cast with the unbelievable doing the inexplicable. The backdrop of Indigo Prophecy is a dark, dirty, imperfect New York City locked down by a snow storm. Its cast: two police detectives and a tech support guy at some faceless bank.

It's with this tableau of the everyday that Indigo Prophecy creates a frightening and engaging tale, a supernatural thriller that plops you as both a reluctant killer and the detectives hunting him.

The game opens with you hovering slightly in front of and above a man sitting in a bathroom stall as he methodically carves symbols into his wrists with a knife.

A few minutes later someone walks into the bathroom and the man rises from the toilet, walks to the second man and attacks him, the scene flashing between reality and a similar scene of a ritual killing. As the knife-wielding man stands you realize that you can now control him.

The game is in essence a murder mystery; the twist is that you take turns controlling the killer and two detectives trying to solve the gruesome fatal stabbing he committed.

The play mechanics are as slick as they are simple, allowing you to investigate, question, listen to your characters' inner dialog and perform tons of actions with a flick of the thumbstick.

After gaining control of the central character, Lucas Kane, in the bathroom, I used the left thumbstick to maneuver him around room. Whenever I approached an object I could interact with, an icon appeared at the top of the screen showing me what I could do and which way I had to push the right thumbstick to do it.

When I walked to the sink I saw that I could push right to wash my hands or up to look in the mirror. This simplistic system allowed me to use a mop to clean the floor of blood, drag the body into a stall and close the door, wash up afterward and silently make my way out of the bathroom, through the diner I was in and into the snowy night.

While this sounds simple enough, the game doesn't just present you with the right choices. There are plenty of ways you can make the wrong choice and end the game with a very premature arrest.

My first time through, I spent so much time exploring the bathroom that a cop, who was having a coffee in the diner, walked in on me, noticed a blood trail leading to the corpse in the stall and arrested me on the spot.

At the end of most chapters, like the one where I escape from the diner, you are presented with a choice of who you want to control in the next chapter. You can pick to guide Kane through his struggle to discover why he lost control of himself and killed someone, or one of two detectives working the case.

Your decision determines through whose eyes parts of the story is told, but doesn't seem to affect the overall outcome.

Early in the game you come to realize that you will have to have a hand at controlling all of the characters at some point if you want to get to the bottom of what is happening to Kane.

As you guide the characters through the serpentine plot of the game, you also have to keep an eye on their mental state. A character's mental health status is affected by their moral choices and the things that happen to them throughout the game. If it gets too low, then something bad happens.

Gameplay is mostly made up of interacting with the world around you, be it Kane's office in a bank or the detectives' investigation of the crime. As in the diner, you walk about looking for clues or people and then interact with them using the menu that pops up at the top of the screen.

While conversations are also handled with the pop-up menu, a timer makes things a bit more interesting. As you talk to a person you decide what questions to ask and how to react to what is being said by using your right thumbstick, but you have a limited time to make your decisions. As the conversation progresses, the time you have to react or select a question diminishes until the conversation is over and you walk away.

This method forces you to pick and choose what you want to say and ask, if you make the wrong decisions you may never get all the information out of a person.

And the game doesn't just rely on selecting options.

When exertion is required of your character, like diving into a frozen pond and swimming to its bottom, or dragging a body across a floor, you have to rhythmically squeeze the right and left triggers on your controller fast enough to build up a bar.

The most bizarre form of control occurs when your character is physically or mentally struggling with some problem. When this occurs, two multi-colored rings pop up. Each represents the directions on your controller's thumbsticks. As your characters works their way through the problem, a series of patterns flash on the rings and you have to mimic them with your thumbsticks.

In one scene, detective Carla Valenti is sitting in on an autopsy of the murder victim. As I watch the autopsy unfold and listen to the medical examiner describe what he finds, the sequences begin to pop up on the screen. I miss the first two sets and Valenti simply watches on in a sort of stunned silence as the doctor rattles off facts. I succeed in the next two and Valenti's thinks to herself that the direction of the stab wounds must indicate that the killer is left handed, and then gets to ask specifics about the stab wounds.

This mechanic also shows up while characters are fighting for their lives or running from danger.

Although the gameplay sound a bit light, when combined with the cinematic cut scenes, an involving plot and three different endings, Indigo Prophecy easily becomes one of the best games of the season.

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