Redjackets

This seems like a game tailored precisely for me. It's vampires planning a heist (though to assassinate someone rather than steal from them). Those are, like, my two favorite movie genres. So I went into it with high hopes.

And overall, those hopes were met! It also has numerous jokes about the life of a grad student and Jeppson's Malört, just to fine-tune it further. I'm pretty sure the author is a fan of Vampire: the Masquerade (and/or Vampire: the Requiem), given the use of terms like "sire" and "fledgling", but that's far from a complaint, coming from me, and the prose tends to get into the sort of overwrought that feels grandly operatic to me rather than tediously purple:

You settle into your own flesh, instantly delivered back into the hands of sentience. Synapses fire in reticulated order. Until this moment, you hadn't realized how little your own thoughts had been making sense. They'd been half-formed gestures at ideation, a feverish delirium. At least it's over now. You can think again.

The meeting room Lynette brings you to is oddly homey. It reminds you of the psychologists' offices at the student counseling center. Sterile enough to be a clinician's office, but dressed up with undefined trappings of home. It reminded you of when you were little, and you might catch a bug in a jar - putting a stick and a leaf in along with it to emulate its natural habitat.

He had to show you off, of course. You were no different to him than the Rolex on his wrist.

I loved the little asides about how a stake to the heart doesn't actually do anything special to vampires, a stake to the heart kills basically anything, vampires aren't special—it's a bit of a joke in the VtM community that vampires are less vulnerable to staking than humans, because it paralyzes a vampire but invariably kills living people—and Fiia's perspective was generally a delight. The premise even got me to actually read the handbook, which is a tall ask before the author has really earned my attention. (I was so sure that the Tailor being "alive and well" was a clue that vampires aren't actually undead in this world.)

Unfortunately, there were some serious speedbumps to my enjoyment that kept jarring me out of the story.

One, there are frequent tense changes. The narration switches from present to past tense and back again between paragraphs with no obvious rhyme or reason, and it got annoyingly distracting. Two, there were occasionally moments I think must have been straight-up glitches, where it switches to a different character's narration mid-paragraph with no indication (in my case, from Fiia's to Lynette's). And three, the character portraits are nice, but with only one exception they seem to exclusively show the character you chose at the beginning, which gets old quickly—they take up a lot of the screen for not much benefit.

Beyond that, I felt like there was very little for me to actually do in the story—there were some choices, but generally there were just five to ten "click to continue" links on a page, eventually leading to another page with more of them. I'm not opposed to dynamic fiction, but the constant links started to feel tedious, and in some cases, the game told me my choices didn't matter when they actually did (!), which feels like a significant no-no. (It said my choices would generally only affect the order of things, not which things happened, but after I examined the thermos first I could never go back and examine the blanket.)

Instead of all the "the last word of each sentence is a link to show the next one" things, I would have liked to make some insignificant choices at least. Things where I can characterize "my" Fiia, where it might not change the plot but it makes me think about how I want to play this. Or, barring that, just to see a whole screen at a time instead of clicking a dozen times to fill the screen.

On the flipside, some of the criticisms I've seen in other reviews didn't really strike me as problems. Some readers said Jeppson didn't strike them as especially evil, but showing Fiia's trauma flashbacks to when he flayed a subordinate alive in front of her just to show her the price of disobedience seemed very effective at changing that. (Maybe if you don't play Fiia those don't show up?) And there was one moment I especially loved but haven't seen discussed before: the letter Jeppson writes to the hunters about wanting Fiia back.

In the letter, he promises not to take any sort of revenge, if Fiia's captors either return her, or show proof that she was destroyed. That little note felt vitally important. To me, that showed that Jeppson doesn't care about Fiia; he cares about plugging an information leak. He doesn't care if she's dead, as long as she's not in his enemies' hands. To me that was the moment that established that Jeppson's lovebombing Fiia was a method of control rather than any actual affection, and I think it was very effective at it.

There were a few other complaints—seriously, these people are professionals but they couldn't tell blood from paint, find an MFA student in a university directory, or figure out why an oil painter would have turpentine on hand?—but they're small by comparison. Overall, I greatly enjoyed the story and the characters, I just wish it had gone through a bit more editing to improve the actual experience of reading it.

An annoying thing that I can’t stop my brain from doing when I’m reading escapist, pulp stuff is think about money. Take this game’s eponymous organization of vampire hunters, an elite crew with offices and safehouses across the globe, dozens if not hundreds of skilled humans as well as the higher-minded sort of undead on staff, killer custom-tailored leather uniforms, a web of high-powered informants and contacts, and an idealistic mission of promoting peace among the vampiric underworld by resolving conflicts via mediation and negotiated truces before escalating things to assassination. It’s a cool secret-society fantasy, but seriously: are we meant to believe that there are enough super-rich elders of the night who want their rivals offed, but only after a rigorous restorative-justice process, to pay for all of these wonderful toys?

It’s unfair to hold Redjackets to such rigorous worldbuilding standards, I admit. This is clearly character-first urban fantasy, with the always-visible character portraits and romance subplots to prove it, and the author’s effort has clearly been focused on things like offering a choice of three different protagonists and fleshing out their angsty backstories rather than diving deep into the setting. And it’s an appealing, diverse crew: you’ve got Fiia, a fledgling vampire on the run from her crime-boss sire, and then the pair of Redjacket agents she turns to for help, vampiric detective Lynette and her human partner, a professor of folklore named Declan. The assassination plot they’re forced into enacting gives them all an opportunity to settle old scores and come to terms with their natures, while giving the author an opportunity to purple up some prose:

"He didn’t get it. He didn’t understand. “I’ve seen people die - I’ve seen-” you start, fumbling over your own tongue limp with panic, with flashing memories of sunset-red tissue, cavernous wounds, and joints bent at wrong angles."

What it doesn’t provide is an opportunity for much in the way of meaningful choices. While picking which of the trio to make the viewpoint character unsurprisingly has a significant impact on the story, there are comparatively few once the game actually starts up, to the extent that I was often surprised to find myself confronted with one after ten or fifteen minutes of just clicking to the advance from one passage to the next – and often these are low-key ones, like picking what order to ask a set of dialogue options that I’d have to exhaust before moving on. I’ve got nothing against dynamic fiction, but I did occasionally feel like the game wound up undercutting itself, for example by offering Fiia a choice of whether to enthusiastically join the Redjackets or recoil in fear of the consequences should her sire find out, but then railroading her into being a happy recruit regardless of the option selected.

Beyond the gameplay mechanics, I often found myself feeling like the author was more focused on telling their story than they were on the audience reading it. The “handbook” feely provided with the game goes into a lot of detail on the Redjacket organization, but it – and many of the quotidian sequences peppered through the narrative – sometimes felt like they presupposed an unearned level of interest in the nuts and bolts of their operations. What’s worse, there are quite a few pieces of the story that are asserted rather than demonstrated, reducing their effectiveness: we’re told that the Redjackets are hypercompetent investigators, for example, but they fail to distinguish paint from blood, find it annoying that an underground arms dealer only takes cash, and land on a plan to kill the baddie not too much more sophisticated than “run up to him at a crowded party and shoot him.” What’s worse, the bad guy’s evil is very much in tell-not-show territory; everyone talks about him like he’s a creep, and admittedly he does overreact to the failure of one of his minions, but what we see of his behavior just involves restoring paintings to sell them for a lot of money, doting on his lover and being dismayed when he’s injured, and being instinctually protective of Fiia even after he knows she’s betrayed him.

There are also some technical issues here that make it hard to enjoy Redjackets as much as I wanted to. Beyond a few typos, I experienced some issues with how the three branches of the story were integrated, with pronouns shifting in some sequences as the game seemed to get confused about who I’d picked to be “you.” Further, while the game indicates that if you replay it, choices you made as another character will be remembered and happen in the same way, I found that this wasn’t the case. And worst of all, after making it through Fiia’s and Lynette’s paths, I wound up hitting a dead end shortly after starting Declan’s, with all the choices available to me leading to a blank passage (the game has a single save slot and no undo, so I couldn’t recover from this bug without restarting).

There’s definitely promise here; this is an ambitious game that often delivers on its character-first goals. But unfortunately it doesn’t hold up to an even slightly skeptical player who wants to know why the bad guy is the bad guy, what choices they’re actually allowed to make, why these cool folks are the heroes, and yes, how they’re getting paid for this hit. Compared to the amount of work the author’s already put in, it wouldn’t take too much more to address these kinds of questions (or, hopefully, fix the bug borking Declan’s part of the story), which would make Redjackets the enjoyable kind of pulp adventure where I could turn my brain off.

Redjackets is a paranormal thriller about a sort of vampire bounty hunting agency, which is to say that they hunt vampires and also some of them are vampires. I will confess: there was a time in my life when this was my shit. But I delved too greedily and too deep in the vampire fiction mines and unleashed the terrible spectre of vampire burnout, so I am not the ideal audience for this game. Nevertheless, I’ve tried to give it a fair review.

So, the game starts by having you choose one of the characters to play as: the naive one, the cynical one, or the brave one. (This is pretty much all you get to know about them in advance.) I picked the cynical one, who turned out to be seasoned vampire hunter Lynette (who is a vampire). Her version of events opens with a few lines about Lynette trying to find someone (unspecified at this point), and then it hits you with this:

“And it looked like the database was frozen to boot. If someone forgot to renew the license again, you were going to lose it. You always wondered if you'd snap one of these days. You just didn't know that a licensing agreement to a database would be the thing that did it.”

Honestly, I loved this as an opening move. It’s so specific! So unexpected! So real! There is a long list of reasons why work might make me snap one of these days, but people not renewing the fucking license on the fucking software I need to do my fucking job is definitely on that list. Vampires: they’re just like us!

Despite the vagaries of software access, Lynette and Declan (the brave one, not a vampire) soon succeed in capturing Fiia (the naive one, a vampire); this turns out to be because they want to recruit her to go after her sire, Rosco Jeppson, an art-loving mob boss. (As vampire baddies go, he seemed a little tame from Lynette’s perspective, but I understand Fiia’s route contains more gory details.) The Redjackets’ scheme to take Rosco down proceeds from there, mostly unfolding as dynamic fiction with the occasional choice. In most cases, these choices’ effects, if any, were unclear, although the choice of who to place in which role for the assassination clearly does change things considerably (enough that one combination in Lynette’s route causes a game-breaking bug, or did when I played).

On the whole, though, what I found myself most invested in was not the action and intrigue, but the low-key moments of vampiric slice-of-life, as Lynette deals with red tape and gives young vampires printouts on how to control their hunger. The romance between Lynette and Declan also has some nice writing around it, although I was a little surprised that the interspecies aspect was treated as a total nonissue. I mean, on the one hand there’s not much new ground to be broken in the area of human/vampire relationship angst, so it’s almost refreshing to just skip the whole thing, but on the other hand, it does seem a bit odd for the characters not to feel some kind of way about it (at least the “one of you is immortal and the other is not” aspect, since the game makes a point of saying that Lynette isn’t tempted by Declan’s blood).

Most of the prose is pretty transparent—casual, modern, not too fancy. This works fine. Every now and then, though, it tries to get ornate, and out of nowhere you get a description like: “An unnatural dysphoria winds its way into the many emaciated oxbow bends of your insides.” I would say I enjoy ornate prose more than the average person, but I think you’ve got to commit to it more than this. If you just drop it in one sentence in twenty, it’s jarring.

The aesthetic is slick, with the obligatory red-and-black color scheme and attractive character portraits (mainly to help you remember whose POV you’re in, I think), but the portraits were a little buggy. Sometimes they covered the text; at least once I got Fiia’s while the POV character was still supposed to be Lynette; on another occasion I got two portraits (both Lynette) next to each other for some reason. If this were cleaned up, though, I’d have no complaints about the visual design.

There were also polish issues with the writing, mainly tense slippage between past and present. Initially the dialogue punctuation was also consistently wrong (in ways I don’t often see combined—it’s rare for the same work to have both dialogue ending in a period followed by a capitalized dialogue tag and dialogue ending in a comma followed by an uncapitalized stage direction, but Redjackets manages to get the rules exactly backwards on this front for a while). It does get cleaner after the introduction, although the errors never totally disappear.

But although Redjackets’ reach exceeds its grasp in various ways, I did enjoy a lot about it, and I would probably check out more works with these characters and/or in this setting—especially if they focused less on the hunt and more on the downtime and the vampire office work.

This is a twine game with three different paths about a group uniting to defeat a powerful vampire. You can play from three perspectives.

I can sum up my reaction to this game by saying I loved the story, liked the mechanics but found a lot of typos and bugs.

The story (from the point of view of a new vampire, which I chose first) is that you are recently-graduated art student whom a powerful vampire lord has turned into a fledgling vampire. You are captured by a human-vampire-cooperative group called the Redjackets, and together decide to take down your lord.

The game boasts three perspectives and allows a variety of both emotional/roleplaying choices together with choices that affect the overall story.

I liked the atmosphere and dialog of the game. There were numerous minor typos, though, and several passages with broken Twine code. The very first screen said 'error' on it (due to some code that checks your previous playthroughs); several times, the text was from the wrong perspective; the face of one of the characters got duplicated once, instead of showing two people; and the game said it would remember my choices when doing the next path but I saw my former character take all the choices that I didn't take.

However, none of these bugs really prevent the playing of the game itself or the enjoyment of the story. So I still like the game overall, I just want to be complete in my review when describing it all.

I do want to call out the color scheme and UI as being especially nice-looking (for my tastes).