Saintsridge Angels

The greatest gift God ever bestowed on writers was editors (I could certainly use one). And while I’m not one to venerate the old days, this is one area where I think the 80s have us beat: the peer-review and testing regimen of Infocom (and its competitors, to a lesser degree), combined with the discipline imposed by brutal memory limits, means that at least some games of that era had a critical eye cast upon every single word they offered up to a player’s delectation. Now, however, the profligacy of functionally-unlimited storage and bandwidth, combined with an IF-scene development culture that sees the role of early players more as testers for errors than partners in sharpening a work, mean that most authors are mostly flying solo on the key questions of what they’re trying to do with a game, and whether they’ve written the right words, and the right number of words, to accomplish it.

This intro is (now that I think about it, somewhat ironically) my attempt to soften my critique of Saintsridge Angels by identifying its primary fault as something structural rather than idiosyncratic – but while it’s certainly not alone in this, rarely have I played a game where I’ve spent so much time wishing there was less of it. There are definitely some high points here, as well as some other flaws, but all of them are drowned under a torrent of text, with the narrative loath to skip over any but the most quotidian event, and unsure why you’d write just one sentence when you could add two or three more on top of them. Like, here’s an excerpt from the game’s opening, the moment when it should be working hardest to hook the player:

"After washing up, I walk downstairs and go to the kitchen, swinging open the pantry and untwisting the half-empty loaf of bread inside. I take out a slice, and put it in the toaster, pushing it down with a struggling click.

"I twist the loaf’s wrapper back up and toss it on the counter, then I kneel down and open my mini-fridge. Damn it, I’m out of butter. Okay, I guess this works.

"I sit on the counter, and stare at the wall while I wait for the toast to cook.
…
…
"…Did I forget to lock the door last night?"

In partial defense of this passage, it’s at least establishing that the protagonist is kind of careless – but by this point the game’s already noted that he forgot to do his laundry, and upon realizing he was running late for class, he shrugged and decided to have a leisurely breakfast instead of booking it. And this molasses-slow intro is hardly the worst offender: there’s a sequence where the protagonist and his new roommates are playing a board game that goes into exhausting detail, down to loving descriptions of individual pieces, then another where they’re attending a dance recital where the writeups of the five warmup dances go on so long that they completely undercut the impact of what should the climactic, final one – I was just desperate for the sequence to end by the time it arrived. Oh, and the protagonist takes like five pages struggling to solve the chicken-grain-fox brainteaser. If the text were tighter and more inventive, this IF-equivalent of slow cinema could be a risky but rewarding choice, I suppose, but the writing here is generally workmanlike; the author does a reasonable job investing the six main NPCs with their own voices, and there are a few memorable images scattered here and there as the plot gets into more overtly supernatural territory, but I confess it wasn’t enough to keep me from skim-reading my way through many of the longer sequences (this is maybe a relevant point to note that I played the “demo” version of the game – based on the plot progression, I’m guessing that the final version will be at least twice as long).

I’m now almost 700 words into the review and haven’t actually gotten into the aforesaid plot (now you know how it feels!) About the only thing I know about harem anime is the basic setup – one dude who’s living with several attractive ladies with color-coded hair and personalities – but that’s still enough to identify the tropes being leveraged here. You’re a college guy who bumps into an old friend he hasn’t seen in a couple of months one day on campus, at which point she says her sorority sisters are looking for a guy to live with them, and lucky you, you’ve got the nod. While there’s at least one reasonably-explicit sex scene, this isn’t a pornographic game by any means – you’d need to work your way through a looooot of other stuff to get your rocks off – but there’s an unreality to the premise that I found I struggled to shake off, made harder by the fact that there are a lot of details that don’t ring true. There’s an early mention of “California’s notoriously erratic weather patterns”, for example, and the protagonist makes a point of emphasizing that this highly-selective school, one of the best in the state, has professors who are repetitive and “incredible noise machines. I guess I can’t blame them, there’s only so much you can say when you’re no more passionate about your syllabus than your students are.”

Well, you might reasonably object, maybe these aren’t so much inconstancies as intentional signs that the protagonist is an inattentive asshole. Maybe! He’s certainly got a lot of unappealing qualities, like a tendency to call his new roommates “bitch” at the drop of a hat, or one of his first conversation options with one of them being literally either “flirt” or “talk down to her” (the “flirt” options ends with you saying “fuck you” to her). He also flat-out asks another “is your family poor”. In fairness, most of the NPCs are pretty bad on this score too – it’s established early-on that one of them hates the nickname “Peppermint”, but almost all the rest of them use it, on top of using the b-word for each other and smacking each other pretty much continually.

The game does eventually provide a rationale for some of this bad behavior, though. The protagonist is anemic, and spent much of his childhood subject to attacks of weakness that left him depending on the aforementioned old friend. In addition to creating some dependency and sublimated resentment, my take is that it also left him feeling like he has to preemptively push others away before his disability makes them feel pity or revulsion. That’s not an especially novel dynamic – the first Thomas Covenant book came out like fifty years ago – but it’s a reasonable one, and if it’s not explored much in what I played, well, maybe that’s part of what the yet-unreleased back half of the game will get into, but at least the latter stages of the current installment started to see the protagonist lower his off-putting defense mechanisms a bit.

Those sections of the game also brought the supernatural elements to the fore. So as it turns out, each of your roommates is haunted by a demon, and the main action of the game involves saving them from these personifications of grief or addiction or guilt. Much like the rest of the game, these sequences go on far too long while simultaneously jumping around without much logic, but they do provide some much-needed action as well as offering a bit of depth to flesh out the initially-caricatured NPCs. There’s also a bit of gameplay inasmuch as some of your choices will lead you to a bad ending, though there’s always an undo button to take you back before you doomed yourself (there are some choices in the “regular” parts of the game, too, but they largely just allow you to pick which of the girls you want to hang out and strengthen your “bond” with).

What’s also interesting is that all these sequences involve you suffering horrific violence, and in at least two out of the three included in the demo, end with you martyring yourself on behalf of the girl you’re trying to save, exposing yourself to stabbings, dismemberments, and even shooting yourself under dream-logic rules that allow you to eventually recover. Adding in the dependent dynamic he had with his childhood friend made me sit up and take more notice, and the there’s a telling detail in the sex scene – which involves the sorority’s queen bee taking control, shoving you on the bed, and grinding on your lap – that gave the game away:

"As I revel in her plush, maternal figure…"

(This lady is like 22, and per the art about the waifiest anime waifu you’ve ever seen, for the record).

So yeah, our hero is a masochistic sub who’s super into dommy mommies, which to be honest is kind of a cool, unique concept for a protagonist who gets to save the day and be in these big action scenes, though it does somewhat reinforce the impression that Saintsridge Angels is a porn game without the porn.

I’ve banged on for more than long enough here, but having spent two days bingeing the game, would I sign up for more once it’s finished? Actually, the cast did wind up growing on me, I am curious where the protagonist’s arc is eventually going, and since it is the case that the last couple of chapters were noticeably leaner (though not actually lean by any objective measure), so despite all the critiques I’ve levied above, yeah, I think I might. But I sure wish the author could find an editor in the meantime.