Metallic Red

(This is one of those games that’s difficult to discuss without getting into spoiler-territory, and blurring out ¾ of the review would be an awkward compromise, so caveat lector).

A couple of times this Comp, I’ve stumbled onto decidedly non-standard ways of experiencing games: I mistook a jokey ending in the Curse for the main thrust of what it was trying to do, and I inadvertently gave myself the same name as the principal NPC in Final Call, making it all go off a bit more Fight Club than intended. Now with Metallic Red it’s happened again: when my solitary space-trucker had a dream where a hooded figure asked “have you drunk the kykeon?”, I assume for most people it will be an alienating, mysterious beat, but for me it was like sinking into a warm bath: oh hey, we’re doing the Eleusinian Miseries 3, er, Mysteries!

In fairness, that’s not all we’re doing. Metallic Red starts out quite austere: after the lovely but forbidding tarot-inflected cover art sets the mood and an introductory paragraph establishes the boxy, dilapidated nature of the ship you’re piloting, you’re confronted with an excerpt from Oedipus Rex that ends “Do you know the family you come from?” From there you’re shunted into a series of highly granular, dull activities as you while away the days until you reach your destination. That first day you meticulously clean the ship; on subsequent ones, you can tend to the greens in the hydroponics bay, exercise to keep muscle atrophy at bay, or just futz around on the internet. More interesting, perhaps, are your flirtations with divination: you 3D-print a tarot deck and pull a single card every day or two, and you’re also erroneously delivered a mechanical orrery that you rewind in order to track the astrological influences of your life and birth, though in both cases there’s something half-hearted or desultory about your engagement, performing the requisite actions without thinking about what they mean.

Oh, and in between days you dream, visited by some that appear to be fantasies, others that might be memories (the Eleusinian Mysteries one struck me as the former at first, but turns out to be the latter). Their content seems to reflect a fear of engagement (in one, you’re horrified at the idea that another person might be coming within a thousand kilometers of your ship), of disorder (an earlier part of that sequence involves trying to adjust one bolt in your food-synthesizing machine, only to be horrified when it breaks), or both (the most viscerally compelling one sees you sitting next to your dad on the grounded ship, as he eats a hamburger and spills food waste all over the consoles).

To say this is all conveys a monastic vibe would be an understatement – but per the twist halfway through, it would also be completely wrong. Your trip, you see, has taken you back to Eleusis, or at least an underground colony that’s named itself after the sanctuary of the cult. Here, the spartan choice-based interface, which previously presented only a few options at a time, each of which had to be exhausted to progress, blossoms into the freedom of parserlike navigation as you’re welcomed back to a spiritual community that once counted you a member: you’re here to consult with the hierophant. And as you wait for your audience, you meet an old friend again, help with the cooking via a lovely peanut-sauce-making minigame that’s dead-on to how I do it (add half a dozen ingredients a little bit at a time to keep things proportional as you accumulate enough for the dish, tasting liberally as you go) before being served a deliciously-described feast – by leaving the brethren, you haven’t escaped asceticism but embraced it.

The hierophant, meanwhile, is no dogma-bound prelate. By this point I was unsurprised that he was sympathetic, while the protagonist indefatigably pressed an absurd point, insisting on being allowed to renounce membership in the community – absurd because, as the hierophant reasonably pointed out, while they’re happy to say goodbye to you and let you continue on your own way, what you’re really asking for is to forget what you learned when you became an initiate, and that’s impossible. And then the game ends.

This review has seen me just uncharacteristically narrating the plot of the game, because I think before evaluating Metallic Red it’s important to get a sense of what it’s doing, and what it’s doing requires some explication (I haven’t read other reviews yet, but I’m very curious to see what folks made of it) – and that comes back to the Eleusinian Mysteries. Again, it’s not just the Mysteries, there’s some business with jade figurines that I think must be drawn from a different tradition, references to bird-auguries that are more Roman than Greek, and it’s notable that your ship is a “Buraq class”, referencing the flying steed that took the prophet Mohammed on a trip to the heavens. But the conversation with the hierophant clearly centers on something the protagonist learned or intuited in a ritual, so this is the natural jumping-off point. And while we don’t fully know what happened in the sanctuary at Eleusis, we do know they focused on the earth-goddesses Demeter and Persephone, and had to do with the latter’s journey to and return from the Underworld: allegories for death, but also rebirth and, perhaps, immortality.

Why does the protagonist want to escape a memory of immortality? We can’t know for sure, and in fact clearly aren’t meant to; in one of the web-surfing sessions from the first part of the game, you read an interview with a game designer who’s chosen to keep the important elements of the game’s narrative off-screen, only gesturing towards them in dialogue, because:

"when an event has already taken place and players only hear about it after the fact we begin to look at agency differently. No one can change the past, but we can use our agency to build a future."

Still, there are intimations of what might be driving this perverse desire. For one thing, the protagonist’s father, he of the distressing dream, is noted as a major supporter of the cult, and presumably the reason you joined it as well, which puts that Oedipus Rex quote at the beginning into some context. And then there’s your attitude to your decaying ship, which is worth quoting at length as I think it serves as a kind of thesis statement:

"You suspect that once it passes from your hands it’ll be decommissioned but you don’t mind old things. It’s not that you admire the past, more that you prefer to own things that can be taken for granted. If you float through a bulkhead awkwardly and chip some of the paintwork, it’s just another chip to be added to the litany of minor damages the craft has sustained over its working life. And the totality of damages is just what the ship is composed of. No one at this point could really imagine what the Metallic Red was like when it was new. When it was first built, the concept of an object without history was entirely different to what it is now, and there’s no way to think backwards into what it meant whilst surrounded on all sides by the ship as it currently stands."

This idea of an object without history recurs in various forms through the piece: there’s also an article on a jet fighter that’s been abandoned and reclaimed by the jungle, which makes the protagonist muse on the contrast between the anonymous thing it’s becoming and the bureaucratically-known machine it once was, with a serial number and kill counts and all. So too is the theme of going backwards: recall how you retrace your past via the orrery.

Existence as the accumulation of damage; a father who’s part of a religious cult; the impossibility of imagining original innocence when inside the wreck of what it’s become. It’s not very subtle when you look at it like that, is it? Noting that “metallic red” can refer not just to rust but to (iron-filled) blood would just be gilding the lily; so too would nailing down the trauma that makes the protagonist view the knowledge of immortality as a curse rather than a blessing, and turn their back on sensual pleasures to boot.

To be clear, I’m not intending to oversimply what the game is saying – we’re finally at the evaluation part now, and I can say that I very much enjoyed this. The author has taken what could have been a simple core story and through restraint, allusion, and skill, created something so memorable no world-fleeing hermit could forget it. Admittedly, perhaps its blurb’s warning that it contains “elements of esotericism” is too understated – the player probably needs to have a reasonable knowledge of its reference points to make sense of Metallic Red’s agenda – but after all the way of the Mysteries is that only the initiates understand.