Barcarolle in Yellow

Film noir and gritty crime movies are a passion for me, and so the cover and blurb for Barcarolle in Yellow hooked me. The cover is a gorgeous red background superimposed by large haunting eyes and a yellow line falling from one eye to a police chalk-outline, reminiscent of the film posters of Saul Bass. The blurb tells of Barcarolle in Yellow as a lost exploitation flick with an ill-fated production and alternate endings only found on Betamax. (The blurb is so deadpan, I Googled to see if it was a real movie.)

The game itself is an homage to the Italian giallo films of the 1970s, stylish entertainments of beautiful women, fashionable set and costume design, sensuality, and violence. The first scene opens with the police grilling the protagonist, who finally launches into a flashback: “From the beginning? That was a long time ago…”

You are Eva Chantry, a British B-movie actor seeking your big break. You’re phoning in a bit part in a film of another infectious Italian genre, the spaghetti Western. News of a starring role in a giallo sends you to Venice, where the intrigue proper begins.

Barcarolle in Yellow toys with the line between reality and script. It is difficult at any point to know if you’re in-scene or in “reality.” Illusion, film, and photography are thematic elements, which draws to mind movies like Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Still, the game always remains closer to it’s giallo roots—there’s at least three scenes where Eva’s clothes come off, and one span where they remain off for a surprisingly long time. Some of the notes in the final scenes are psychically jarring, and not mere horror-movie gore.

The blurred line between reality and script is most visible in you, the player, being coached—and often forced—through game scenes. The restrictions are usually framed in terms of Eva remaining in her movie part, although it’s hard to know when the cameras are rolling in front of her, or only rolling in her head. At first, I found playing the actor directed to stay on script an interesting choice for interactive fiction. As the game progressed, the novelty wore off.

There’s so much that could have been expanded upon—after all, you’re in Venice, a beautiful city of so much history. Straying off the dictated path will get you scolded by the narrator urging you on to your next goal (which I took as Eva’s psyche, and the dissociative disorders actors sometimes experience off-stage).

The largest problems, by far, are parser-related. Too often I found myself struggling to find the right term, when some basic programmed synonyms and clearer descriptions would have saved me some hassle. It’s surprisingly easy to die in places. The tight timing of some scenes mean that you have not a turn to waste or be killed. In other places, I found myself flailing around trying to find the right trigger to move the scene on to its next beat.

I really wanted to love this game. It opened with great promise. Eva could have been developed more, the scenes allowed to breathe, and the parser problems cleaned up. Barcarolle in Yellow feels like an early draft of an ambitious interactive fiction that needed more time in development.

(This is an edited version of a review I originally published in my blog during IFComp 2023)

I usually start any IFComp by playing a horror game that speaks to me. In 2023, the game that was plainly shouting at me was Barcarolle in Yellow by Victor Ojuel.

This parser adventure is an IF take on the cinematic subgenre known as giallo, in which I have some expertise. So even if this turns out to be my only IFComp 2023 review (spoiler alert - it did) I hope it's one that can help other players appreciate the qualities of this game in the context of its source material. I'm sure Barcarolle will entertain anyone who enjoys a hectic, lurid murder-mystery thriller with violence and some sex/nudity, for that's what it is, but I can still imagine a lot of "What was that about?" questions regarding some of its content in the minds of players who've never encountered a giallo or giallo-like before.

About giallo in general

Giallo is Italian for yellow. In Italian publishing, there's a history of classic mystery novels being released in cheap editions with distinctive yellow covers and sensational cover art. Their success led to newer pulp mysteries being published in the same style. When these stories began to take cinematic form, directors quickly turned to producing original murder-mysteries inspired by them, but with a modern outlook. These films were more psychologically-focused, erotic and horrific than the books that originally inspired them (though sometimes not more so than the covers that inspired them) and often featured innovative audiovisual styling, gore, nudity, and a high body count. This kind of film became known as the giallo and was at its international peak of popularity in the 1970s.

The majority of giallo came from Italy, followed by Spain. Some were coproductions that shared Italian and Spanish actors and production crew. The film's casts were often studded with internationals. In Barcarolle in Yellow the heroine PC, Eva Chantry, is English (according to her passport) and is off to shoot a giallo in Venice when the game begins.

The name and cover art for Ojuel's game are on the mark in their pastiche quality. Compare Barcarolles cover art to the real poster for The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) (link to the poster from the film's wikipedia page.

The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) poster
The international success of one particular giallo, Dario Argento's The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (1970) set off a copycat trend in the naming of these films. Numbers, animals and colours featured heavily. As did salaciousness. Consider these titles:

Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971)
Cat'O'Nine Tails (1971)
The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972)
Strip Nude for your Killer (1975)
Watch Me When I Kill (1977)
Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970)
The Bloodstained Butterfly (1971)

It turns out that a barcarolle is a kind of Venetian gondolier's song. And for a giallo IF initially presenting to a giallo-unfamiliar audience, the colour yellow is an obvious choice.

Giallo, as they were unto themselves in the 1970s, aren't really made any more. Some thrillers have giallo-like elements, but never enough to fully qualify them or give them the giallo feel. What we do see produced today is the occasional hyper-loyal giallo pastiche, like the 1970s-set Abrakadabra or 1980s-set Crystal Eyes. Abrakadabra and its trailer are so amazingly accurate, I genuinely thought the film was a giallo from the 1970s when I first saw the trailer; the film was released in 2018.

Finally, one of the giallo masters from the day, Dario Argento, is still alive, and brought out a brand new giallo in 2022, Dark Glasses. For all its flaws, I still think it's his best film for a long time.

Spoiler-free play advice

The game uses few verbs, and mercifully, all talking is achieved just with a TALK (PERSON) command. All commands needed to play are listed in the HELP. The key advice I can give is to WAIT whenever in doubt, as many scenes progress on their own, TALK TO (PERSON) whenever still in doubt, save frequently (though UNDO is also your friend) and finally, pay attention to your wardrobe. It's both fun in an IF sense to change your clothes, but it also turns out to be policed in a practical sense by this game. Wear whatever your commonsense tells you is appropriate for whatever task you're about to undertake.

About Barcarolle in Yellow

In this giallo adventure set in 1975, the player takes the role of Eva Chandry, an actor whom the credits describe as starring "as herself". The credits are interwoven with the game's opening turns set in a police station, where an interview with Eva is beginning. Eva often finds that life is like a performance, or that life reminds her of her art more often than the other way around. Thus the game is presented to the player within the frame of it being a film, and is also about a film actor appearing in a giallo film to be shot in Venice.

Giallo films often blur the lines between reality, dreams, imagination, and false memories of the seen and heard, but they rarely enter the postmodern. Barcarolle in Yellow throws in a foregrounded fourth wall element that adds to the pleasurably discomforting pressure the game is always applying through its prose. Is the game reality the true reality? Or does that lie in some layer above or below what Eva experiences? What she does experience is all the mayhem of filmmaking, typically chaotic giallo plotting, and being the target of a mask-wearing killler in Venice, the same way her character is stalked in the script.

Killers in giallo films are often motivated by Freudian traumas from their past. As often, the traumas are revealed to the audience in piecemeal flashbacks cued by the developing investigations of the murders. While I'm used to giallos going back, I laughed when Barcarelle went way back (to 1862) and to another country (USA) in what appeared to be its first flashback. In its typical rug-pulling style, this was revealed to be a scene from a Western Eva was acting in.

Overall, Barcarolle in Yellow turns out to be a dangerous and tricky game, with frequent physical threats to the PC, death on the cards and numerous abrupt changes of place and reality. However, it also has a strong, often linear trajectory that keeps it from being too hard. I found most difficulty stemmed from under-implementation. It doesn't cater to enough synonyms and possibilities for the amount of prose there is. This combined with a few timing-critical scenes makes for some frustrating passages. On the plus side, the THINK command will almost always point the player in exactly the direction they need to go. I didn't use THINK on my first playthrough, but used it a lot on the second to shore up identify-the-noun moments that had repeatedly held me up.

As the attractive Eva, the player must get around an excitingly compressed version of Venice, occasionally act in the film she's in (by following its script!) investigate the stalker who appears in both Eva's life and the film, and manually handle her wardrobe. Cue giallo-typical nudity, both appropriate (having a shower) and justifiable but glamourised (being nude in a prolonged dream, except for a mask). This being a giallo, the game comments, via Eva's thoughts, on the way the camera observes the female body through an exploitation film lense.

There are a lot of entertaining scenes and tricks that toy with agency as an IF player, as a woman PC and as an actor in a film. The world of the game is as aggressively sexist and sexual as many giallo films were, and those films already experimented a lot with people's roles. The agreed-upon prototype giallo is Mario Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) which foregrounded, in one stream of the genre, a kind of outsider female experience. The American heroine in that film takes a holiday in Rome, witnesses a murder there and eventually solves it. Eva is Barcarolle's outsider protagonist. She visits a city in another country to shoot a film and also has to play a tourist in that film. The player even has to shoot photographs during Eva's acting scenes.

Some giallo could be very gory, with particularly outré deaths that are now regarded as proto-splatter-film. Barcarolle hits these genre notes, too. It features a knife murder committed through the eye, a speedboat attack and a hanging by designer scarf. The fresh and well-informed performance of so many giallo notes in the game is impressive.

Giallo films were ultimately open to exploiting any dimension of cinema sensation they could in their commitment to producing involving, shocking, thrilling and twisty murder-mysteries. Bigger twists and shocks were better, even if they didn't make a lot of sense. Some giallo were tightly plotted, others lurching shock machines, but most had their eye on overall audience satisfaction. This hectic quality can be perceived in Barcarolle in Yellow, too. Some of the game's shocks involve unexpectedly sudden endings or upendings, or the placement of moments of fourth wall breakage. There are in fact multiple endings to the game that riff on the bizarre nature of solutions to giallo murder mysteries; I found four endings so far and can tell there's at least one more.

I've played a couple of Victor Ojuel's other games over the years. They both featured vivid or innovatively-realised geography, and that's true again of Barcarolle's handy version of Venice. The games also needed more implementation work to my eyes, and that's also true of Barcarolle. Because I like this game very much, I would also like to see a solider version of it, without all the excess line breaks, with the typos cleaned up and all those synonyms added and programming beefed up to remove the bumping-against-the-walls moments. However, with its strong hint system, Barcarolle won't leave a player stranded if they do hit the walls, and that's more important for today and for players' IFComp experience with the game. I also appreciate what programming an IF game as event-driven as this one is like.

In conclusion, I highly recommend Barcarolle in Yellow. It shows great and affectionate knowledge of the films and related cultural milieu that inspired it.

(This review is based on the IFComp version of the game.)

I already liked the sound of this title before I knew what it meant. It has an inviting ring to it. Then I looked up “barcarolle” and found it’s a Venetian gondoliers’ folk song. That got me interested even more. A bit more searching learned that the “yellow” refers to an Italian murder/horror/mystery film and literature genre, named after the distinctive yellow (“giallo”) covers of the pulp novels that started the style.

An actress travels to Venice to star in a Giallo film. On her first night, she barely escapes a murder attempt. During filming the next day, a similar attack happens.

Barcarolle in Yellow is set up as an interactive movie script, blurring the lines between what is the scripted movie world and what is the in-game real world. Failed commands are met with an angry director’s voice telling you to focus on the part, descriptions of the player character’s actions make reference to an unseen audience, people around you are viewed as through a camera lens,…

Eva, the PC, is filming in Venice, so we also follow her during her acting work, and have to enter the commands according to the prewritten script she has to follow, adding another layer of confusion as to which world we’re engaging with.

As I noticed in the author’s work 1958: Dancing with Fear, IF is a genre that lends itself very well to a cinematic scripted style, allowing the player to direct the main character and decide on the action. Here, in Barcarolle in Yellow it seems that a perfect opportunity presents itself for a suspenseful murder mystery. The story is divided in scenes and acts, each with its own pace, atmosphere and tension. We can almost see the camera cut from one location to the other in the transition between scenes.

The writing is good, with a nice balance between attention to the surroundings (or the set…), and the events happening to our main character Eva Chantry. I like the use of space, with part of Venice condensed down to a handful of locations without feeling cramped.
I love the idea of the game.

But, however much I want to, I do not like this game as it is entered in the Comp. Perhaps aiming for next year’s Spring Thing would have offered the author more time to make it as good as it can be.

A game that’s modeled after a suspenseful film should move. Half the time I spent with Barcarolle has been struggling with the parser and unclear directions.

A game that depends on smoothly following the course of action, dragging the player along with the action and putting her on the corner of her seat with tension needs a generous, forgiving parser.
Synonyms for all the nouns should be abundant, every action should have half a dozen alternate commands, the player should be able to trust that her intuitive commands will be recognised and have immediate consequences that hasten the story forward.

Instead, half my commands were met with that angry director’s voice yelling at me “No, no, focus on this scene, don’t start dissociating again!”. And that’s a great story-appropriate customisation of the default rejection response! But not when the game recognises so few of the player’s commands that it comes up again and again.

I really liked Dancing with Fear. I have good memories of its main character Salomé. I’m starting to like Eva too, this game’s main character. It would be a pity to keep playing while frustrated at the implementation, and missing a great story with a great character unfold.
I’d love to play Barcarolle in Yellow again once it’s gone through at least one more thorough round of testing and editing. The way it is now, it doesn’t do its protagonist honour.