TODAY ON KS: We review L.A. Noire, a game that isn’t what it seems.

What’s with Cole Phelps’s rotten attitude? Maybe it has something to do with living in an inescapable city full of people who are seemingly obsessed with him. Maybe those people represent something he doesn’t want anyone to know. Kirk Hamilton runs through the claustrophobic yet curiously empty L.A. Noire looking for meaning:

As I ambled exhaustedly along, I decided that L.A. Noire is not a detective story at all. It is a parable about death and purgatory, a story of forgiveness. A man named Phelps went to war. He had his share of flaws, and in the midst of battle he made some bad decisions. Those decisions had repercussions that no one could have anticipated. Some of them were terrible, but then, war is terrible.

Read the rest here.