Suspended in the air so that all of your weight is concentrated on a single point halfway down your spine

Geez, ^ spoiler alert.

We have here the second part in the RGB trilogy – and while it’s recognizably of a piece with He Knows That You Know and Now There’s No Stopping Him, it also throws some curves into the emerging formula. For one thing, the cast list gives us three characters this time: green makes a repeat performance, and we’re introduced to red, “a handsome and charming, if quick-tempered and immature, man” but also purple (purple?), “a kind and gentle, if naive and sheltered, woman.” But rather than a three-way conversation, this green-themed instalment is rather a solitary affair: you play as red, waking up in a dark, solitary room suspended in the air so that… well, see above.

The mechanics of choice are different this time too – you’re given an array of possible actions across the bottom of the screen. Given your predicament there isn’t a lot you’re able to accomplish besides try to look around as best you can, cry out for assistance, or start swinging… eventually you’ll overhear a discussion between the other characters that sheds some light on what’s going on and how you got here, and your attempts to escape bring the short story (this is another Neo Twiny entry, so it’s also 500 words) to another violent close – that’s directly in keeping with part one, at least.

While I found this part a bit slighter than the blue one – as I noted in that review, dialogue lets you do more with less; the need to describe action chews up a chunk of the word count – there’s still plenty of thematic weight to proceedings. Though speaking of spoilers, I should probably spoiler-block the rest…

(Spoiler - click to show)So turns out we, the callow and potentially overbearing husband of the ingenue purple, have been strung up and left to die by green, our mother-in-law. While the milieu has apparently changed somewhat between entries in the series – blue had a historical feel, while the language here is more modern and reference is made to a laptop – the opening page stresses that characters “retain their colors throughout all acts”, and I’m inclined to take it at its word. If this green is the same as the one who killed her husband to escape him, it’s perhaps unsurprising that she’s over-protective of her daughter given her own experience of marriage (though given that said daughter is purple, not teal, we perhaps are being prompted to assume that the family history here isn’t as simple as all that?) and level of comfort with murder. Making the parallels starker yet, as she kills red, green murmurs “she will heal… she always does,” suggesting that much as blue did away with more than half-a-dozen brides, she’s killed several of purple’s grooms by this point.

There’s probably more going on here than just “mothers-in-law, amirite?”, though. The other thing of note that green says is “I know your plans for my daughter… I won’t stand for them.” Given the framing of the series so far, the mind naturally goes to sex and/or death, but it’s interesting that in addition to secreting you away, green has also stashed all your possessions in this abattoir: “your books, your gramophone, your laptop – everything’s here.” Knowledge, art, and creativity are also being shut away and taken from purple, which perhaps is part of what keeping her innocent entails – and part of what prevents her from understanding the lies that green spins.

As I said in my review of the first game, though, these are all tentative thoughts; I’d be surprised if the major themes I’ve noticed so far don’t get carried over into the final act, but I also can’t say I have a clear sense of how the series will culminate. But suffice to say that I’m continuing to be intrigued, and am looking forward to seeing how, or whether, everything connects.