He Knows That You Know and Now There's No Stopping Him

The tale of Bluebeard is a violent story about a woman who learns that her husband was a rather gleeful murderer of his previous wives. The story has invited many different interpretations, ranging from a moralizing about the evil curiosity of women to a feminist stance against trusting one's husband in a patriarchal society.

Cochran seems to have recognized the versatility of this fairy tale by offering us three acts, three colors, and three Bluebeards.

The first act, He Knows That You Know and Now There's No Stopping Him, begins with the wife hiding a knife as her husband confronts her for opening the door. The player is given some dialog options, either to ask for forgiveness or to tell him that he will never be forgiven. The look of the game feels like I'm interacting with a play script, especially with the early modern English dialog. The Bluebeard character responds appropriately to my choices and makes me feel like my input matters. And yet, the outcome will always be the same -- it is that the choices the player makes will slightly contextualize the inevitable act.

The second act, Suspended In the Air so that All of Your Weight Is Concentrated on a Single Point Halfway Down Your Spine, puts the player in the role of the Bluebeard character who is, well, suspended in the air. There's not much context to be gleaned from the story: the player character wakes up in a daze, hears his wife and mother-in-law running around, and bleeds to death. There are several actions the player can take to escape, and the illusion of player agency is best expressed in this game. Several choices branch off into different narrative threads: in my second playthrough, I swung my player character too hard to open the door, and his wounds tore apart. He gets new options: crawl, scream, and bleed. Not the most useful set of actions, but it felt like my actions led to that bloody conclusion. It didn't matter that I knew that the ending was predetermined; it was so convincing that I didn't feel cheated at all.

Perhaps the most surprising fact is the mention of a [spoiler]laptop[/spoiler] at the end. The first act had primed me to see everything as historical, so I was quite unnerved by the dissonance.

The third (and as of this writing, the latest) act, It can't be true it mustn't be true, seems to reflect the player's state of mind as they near the end of the cycle. Set in the present, the player character receives a warning message about the man who invited them into his apartment. He's another Blackbeard character, of course, but the player character admits he's kind of hot. The game then transitions into a small escape room format: the player can examine objects and solve mini-puzzles to find new items that can help them escape.

But we all know how it must end. Echoing the first game, the player character can do a lot of meaningful things, but the ending will always be the same. No matter what Bluebeard iteration we're in, someone has to die.

The three games differ in structure, gameplay, characters, atmosphere, and time period. But they all play on the same horror: the patriarchal horror of the man you sleep with. There's no place to run because this is the person you've chosen to spend your life with. He is your life as far as the games are concerned. You either fight or become a victim.

How should we then understand the RGB Cycle as a whole? Is it a fatalistic interpretation of how abuse will always occur? A call to arms to be skeptical of charismatic men who might take advantage of you? A sobering reminder that the Bluebeard fairy tale is timeless because we see so much domestic violence in families and households?

It's hard to say: the cycle offers no palatable interpretation that rationalizes or softens the chaotic horror of the Bluebeard tale into something understandable. Arguably, the RGB Cycle resists such easy, authoritative readings because it is ultimately faithful to the spirit of the fairy tale. Unlike the more moralistic versions like Charles Perrault's, it revels in the sheer violence and paranoia of Bluebeard as a character. At most, the RGB Cycle acknowledges that yes, there is a cycle, and the actions we take will never free us from it -- but it is strangely silent about its message.

I find this silence quite admirable because it means that I have to meditate on the violence and find out what it means for me. Horror is most interesting to me when the "monster" is explicit, but its themes are contradictory and ambivalent; we know who the monster is from John Carpenter's The Thing, but the ending and its implication on the story remain a lively source of debate. Enigmas are more interesting to think about than something that has a clear solution.

I'm willing to admit that I don't understand the RGB Cycle, and that's why I really like it. I often thought I had an idea or two, but it was immediately negated by the next passage or something before that. Replaying the game helps very little except to reveal the lack of agency -- and even that is hard to parse thematically. What does it mean to have false choices in a Bluebeard story? Who knows, and that's why I find it exciting to think about it.

The RGB Cycle understands the timeless appeal of the Bluebeard fairy tales. The confrontation between husband and wife over a dark secret may feel simple as a plot device, but it leads to profound interactions that reflect gender norms, the cycle of abuse, and much more. Many people, then and now, revisit the fairy tale because there's something truly scary and compelling about not knowing everything about the person you've chosen to love. The RGB Cycle simply repeats this horror over and over again, never satisfied with one interpretation. It seeks diversity, repetition, and reiterations. There may be no ultimate meaning in this loop of writing and rewriting Bluebeard, but the horror remains resonant: the tale is still unsettling in 2024 and the years to come.