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

The randomizer must know that I’ve been saying nice things about it, because I just realized that it’s managed another cool trick: it put the three entries in Charm Cochran’s “RGB Trilogy” relatively close together in my to-play list, and in the proper order to boot! I contemplated waiting to review them all at once, since from context, they seem to be designed to be played that way – they were all entered together in the Neo-Twiny Jam (meaning they’re also short, given the 500 word limit for that event), and there are links to the other Acts within each game. But I ultimately decided it might be more interesting to review them piecemeal, to better track how the themes and structure emerge with each installment (so no, this has nothing to do with padding my review count on IFDB and for the sponsorships, perish the thought).

The last review will probably be a bit weightier than the first two, I suspect, since I’ll hold off on digging into what I think the trilogy is doing until I see everything it has to offer, but fortunately, even just in this first Act there’s a fair bit to talk about. From the color-coding of the game’s itch.io page, it’s clear that this is the “blue” entry, with later entries taking the “green” and “red” slots; further reinforcing the color motif, the dramatis personae page that opens the game identifies the two characters not by name, but by description – the game is constructed as a dialogue (which is an efficient way to use the scant words the jam rules allow) between “a rich and imposing, if ugly and impulsive, man” (whose words are all in blue) and “a quick-thinking and witty, if selfish and manipulative, woman” (whose words are all in green). The psychological priming here isn’t especially subtle, and the first line of the game proper – a stage direction noting that the blue man is “brandishing a bloody key” – pretty well confirms what story we’re in: this is Bluebeard, that most Freudian of folktales.

Except, well, that’s not exactly right. The language is off, for one thing: the game is written in a Shakespearean English that feels a bit archaic for a story that was famously collected by Perrault. This is a dangerous choice, since there’s a risk of ending up sounding like a bad 80s RPG, all thee-ing and thou-ing, but I found the style here worked – the grammar and syntax are credibly done, while the vocabulary is kept relatively modern for ease of reading. It winds up giving a hint of old-fashionedness without slowing down the dialogue too much.

That’s important because – understandably given the space constraints – the game is concerned just with the climax of the tale: blue has caught green (his wife) in the act of defying him, and bad news, the player is responsible for what green says as she attempts to escape punishment. The back and forth her is really punchy; each line of dialogue is fairly short, and the back-and-forth volley between the partners in this two-hander feels rapid, and intense, as a result. Your possible responses tend to include calling blue out for his crimes, pleading for forgiveness, and playing for time, but not in a mechanical way – sometimes you only have two options, and the confrontation does escalate fluidly, so I think it would be hard to stick to just one approach without intentionally disengaging from the story; I did find my approach varied satisfyingly in replays, but the game did a good job of shaping an arc from my choices regardless of what I did, sometimes starting out defiant and then growing chastened, other times desperate for mercy and then trying just to delay the inevitable once it became clear that wasn’t working.

There’s one other interesting aspect of the game’s storytelling that’s worth discussing under spoiler tags: (Spoiler - click to show)the main way the game departs from the story it’s riffing on is the ending – because blue does not kill green the way he’s killed all his previous wives, instead she ganks him with the dagger she’s had concealed behind her back this whole time. For all that the presence of the weapon is flagged from the very beginning, it’s still an effective twist, not least because the player’s given no direct hint that all of green’s conversational gambits are just setup for a stabbing. Indeed, one of the options you’re given late in the game is simply to “acquiesce” to your own imminent murder, but even that is a feint and leads to blue’s bloody end just the same. I really enjoyed this move; it’s an effective way of demonstrating exactly how manipulative green can be, and exploits the tensions within IF’s triangle of identities (player, narrator, protagonist) to good ends.

There’s more to say about the game, or at least more to speculate on – I’m curious what direction the Hamlet quote that closes things off is meant to be pointing to, and when we’ll be introduced to the “red” character who must surely come onstage at some point to complete the design. But I’ll hold all that in reserve until I get further into the trilogy; for now, I’ll just note that I’m wrapping up Act One very interested in seeing more.