Blood and Silver

Blood and Silver is a short vignette in the relationship between a vampire and his human partner, deepened by being one installment in a larger series featuring the couple. I’d played its immediate predecessor, Blood and Sunlight, in last year’s Review-a-Thon, so I was able to get my bearings quickly, though the flip of viewpoint character to the human, Lyle, made for an interesting change of pace. And “pace” is the right word because the game does a good job jumping into an interesting situation – you decide to get your boyfriend, Zach, a piece of jewelry as an anniversary present, not knowing that silver is painful for vampires, and the awkwardness of the misfired gift leads to a state-of-the-relationship chat.

The choice structure here is highly granular, with the ability to pick just about every bit of dialogue Lyle utters, which means there’s a lot of branching – there are nine endings, and while the broad contours don’t change too much (presumably to allow for better continuity with future games in the series), there’s a broad variation in the emotional impact, with this moment seeming like can be either a high point or a low point in the relationship, depending on what choices you make. Understandably, deciding to deflect Zach’s attempts to have a heart to heart or emotionally withdrawing after he’s said his piece lead to the most diffident endings, while being more open and steering into the fraught waters of potential conflict is riskier but potentially more rewarding.

The prose style is a good fit for the story; it’s dialogue focused, and unafraid of talking clearly about emotions:

"He sighs, hands gripping the cold metal railing. 'I sometimes feel like being with me is a waste of your time. You could be with someone who could stay over at your place, and go to concerts with you and your sister, and wear the ring you bought them. I feel like I’m always restricting you and letting you down, and I know—' he continues over the objection you’ve begun '—that you’d never say that, but it’s how I feel.'”

There are some nicely-observed details and a few gentle jokes, but those never distract from what’s basically an intense two-handed one-act play.

My one early disappointment with the game is that, per that excerpt, at first the game seemed to be replaying the same key conflict that featured in Blood and Sunlight – Zach’s feeling that because he’s a vampire, he doesn’t deserve love – but while Blood and Silver reestablishes that dynamic to allow players who haven’t experienced the earlier game to get up to speed, it soon breaks new ground. See, one of the things Zach feels bad about is his need to feed on Lyle, which provides him necessary sustenance but also brings him a lot of pleasure. All your choices in response to this prove some degree of reassurance, but Lyle’s internal monologue indicates that actually, there is a potential fly in the ointment here – once the endorphins of new infatuation had faded, the feeding has grown physically inconvenient and, what’s worse, emotionally distancing, as Lyle lies back and thinks of England while Zach enjoys an activity that’s unsurprisingly heavily orgasm-coded.

A mismatch between how much the members of a couple are enjoying sex isn’t an especially novel topic, of course, but what’s interesting here is that both Lyle and Zach identify as “gray ace” – I am old and boring so I had to google this to learn it means largely asexual but experiencing fitful moments of sexual attraction. This seems to play out in what we’re told of the physical side of their relationship, with regular makeout sessions that don’t appear to escalate beyond (er) necking. But with Zach frequently achieving a level of physical satisfaction via blood-drinking that doesn’t appear to be shared with Lyle, I was curious how this might destabilize Zach’s identity, or at least Lyle’s understanding it, and the impact those shifts might have on their relationship – and their shared ace identity is a big deal, we’re told that’s how they first met each other!

The downside of this being one installment in a larger series is that just as I was getting invested in how the protagonists were going to navigate this new challenge, the game stopped, with Lyle noting that they’re not ready to be honest with Zach about these feelings yet. I read that as a suggestion that there’ll be more to come on this front in a future sequel, so while I’ll admit to being disappointed that the game ends where it did, it definitely leaves me eager for what’s coming next.