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.