VESPERTINE

It’s appropriate that VESPERTINE comes from the Goncharov jam, since more so than the classic techniques of interactive fiction the primary structural approach is the montage. We’re given hints of context, allusions to background, a looming presentiment of violence that will become the plot, but mainly what we see is two men coming together: the eponymous Russian mobster and his chameleon lover, Andrey. It’s clear that theirs is a long-standing affair, but the game isn’t overly fussed with sectioning time and space to keep their illicit encounters distinct: they might be tangled together in bed and a footnote will see them encountering each other in the street, but who’s to say whether that’s a memory from five years or five minutes ago, or even a glimpse of things to come? Indeed, as the evocative prose ranges over the territory of their bodies and the territory of their relationship, the boundaries between the two sometimes dissolve: at the level of language, in the way any given “he” might refer to either or both of them, at the level of metaphor, in the way Goncharov writes secret missives in the black book Andrey keeps as a journal.

The writing is dreamlike yet holds nothing back in exalting these characters in each others’ eyes. This early bit about Andrey’s penchant for hair-dye as an element of disguise is emblematic of the way a facility with the tools of violence and crime become sexy:

"But I’d want you all the same as a blonde - like the wheat fields we painted portraits of each other in, summer sun baking over our shoulders. Alla prima: all at once. You and I know something about that. I’d have eyes only for you as a brunet: church mouse brown, a shy, faltering touch over communion. Such a devoted man. And as a redhead - you captivate the room, eyes drawn to the flame, to the way you liven up a room."

Color recurs – there’s that link to film again:

"I love you the way the dead sea loves: caustic, catastrophic, and still- halophilic archaea persist in those blue, blue waters. The way a lighthouse throws its light over the ocean waves: a beacon of warning, to stay away- refuge is not in sight. Those craggy corals and rough rocks will tear into your hull, until there’s nothing left of you."

It’s heady stuff, straining at the very edges of the sublime but never tipping over into the ridiculous. The disorienting way the prose is delivered also makes the player vulnerable to sudden, unexpected imagery: the main thrust of the progression spools out linearly, through end-of-passage links that move onward, but each page boasts several superscripted end-notes as well as a single highlighted word or phrase that will reveal new vignettes, some short flashbacks, others discursions into the first person, and yet others perhaps indicating hoped-for futures that may or may not come. It’s an effective delivery mechanism, though I found it perhaps a bit baroque, with the many different ways and places to click drawing more attention to themselves than I needed them to (I wonder how this piece would work as literary hypertext?)

Beyond the slightly over-engineered interface, the only other thing that left me less than enraptured was a fleeting reluctance to believe that these hyperaesthetes truly lived the lives the story was telling me they did: none of the violence they inflict here is brutal, it’s just as heartbreakingly beautiful and painful as their lovemaking. Perhaps having more familiarity with the Goncharov meme would help with that, though – or perhaps it’s just another nod to the game’s filmic origin, as the camera’s got a long history of making killing look like art.