Redjackets

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.