Redjackets

ALRIGHT! A horror-themed, noir-adjacent investigation jam! About TIME we got one of these!

Notwithstanding that snarky opening, I am in fact quite positively disposed to this genre. If not QUITE as rare as the above paragraph intimates. You are one of 3 investigators in a vampire-politics world, charged with maintaining a semblance of human-vampire peace. By whom? Unclear. Resourced and staffed by? Uncertain. Relative authority in the shadow world? Unspecified. This slipperiness of setup is actually not a problem, at least not ALWAYS a problem, as a stage-setting infodump would be far worse. Its lack of detail often allows us to assume the best, or hand wave gaps, to keep things bubbling.

Before we get there, let’s talk characters. You get to choose to play one of three. I chose the “Hollow, Seasoned, Stubborn” one. What? Don’t read too much into that. This put me in media res into an investigation of a previously captured vampire that had transgressed through inexperience. Already though, there was a disconnect. The illustration topping the page seemed of a young person, clearly not me, so I assumed must have been the charge I was investigating. Nope! This grizzled, ex-cop, ‘too old for this…’ curmudgeon looked all of 19. Ok, vamps don’t age physically but background suggested I was a cop BEFORE turning. That was a dissonance with the piece.

Here’s another dissonance. The link-select paradigm produced what I believe to be an unintended consequence. Like a lot of links, it was bolded and underlined to convey its UI purpose. It was ALSO almost always the last sentence on the page. Reading a bolded, underlined sentence conveys a weight, an import to those words. THESE WORDS HAVE MEANING, READER! Here, read these two passages and see how they play differently in your head:

“Because if we’ve got a victim, and we’ve got a suspect… What we need now is a motive.”
“Because if we’ve got a victim, and we’ve got a suspect… What we need now is a motive.”

Right? You can HEAR the swelling musical DUN DUN sting! Now, imagine that on EVERY PAGE. It quickly establishes a rhythm in your head, an offputting one of the narrative throwing import at you, so often unearned. It is hard to overstate how distracting this becomes by the end. I think, textually speaking, the work would have been better served by a simple > prompt or somesuch at the end of a page rather than distort the text itself. Even a different color without highlighting markup might be less intrusive and still serve the UI purpose.

The last dissonance I want to observe is plot-execution-based. Despite its mostly obscured nature, when the operation of the detective agency WAS detailed, it was unconvincing. In an early sequence, the third playable character, a young vampire, (Spoiler - click to show)is turned to an undercover agent. This turn was ill-justified and unconvincing in the text. The reasons AGAINST the development were well established, then summarily discarded seemingly with a shrug. The fact that my character, the grizzled-seen-it-all ex-cop, took this turn at face value despite GREAT reasons not to… I didn’t buy it. The fact that it never paid off later kind of made it worse. Then to GIFT this (Spoiler - click to show)new recruit with a uniform known far and wide as the organization’s calling card… (Spoiler - click to show)TO AN UNDERCOVER AGENT??? Later, during a climactic confrontation, a fight scene seemingly depended on antagonists standing stock still while the protagonists executed increasingly complex moves. The work was peppered with details like this that just didn’t land.

I have gotten the negatives out of the way, and since many of them showed up early, I can’t say I was ever truly engaged in the work. (Well, except… I’ll get there.) That said, there were as many or more positive details I simply loved, not the least of which was the character of my PC and another playable agent, Declan. They had agency, voice, awesome personalities and showed admirable competence more often than not. Legitimately interesting character creations.

Another strength was the in media introductions of other organizations and their casual conflict/intersection with our heroes. This was employed as an effective way to embiggen the world, and often with just enough detail to entice and not too much to draw questions. I particularly liked the bureaucratic incompetence of the California branch.

These treats, enjoyable as they were, were to be eclipsed by a midpoint scene that rocked me out of my ossifying impressions. To that point in the story there had been a lowkey connection between two characters, one I had been nurturing when presented with choices to do so. It exploded into a scene of such incredible emotional nuance I literally sat straighter in my chair as I devoured it. It EASILY could have been stock mutual confessions set to swelling music. Instead, it honored both characters (and my prior choices), and presented a bittersweet emotional realism and earned drama the work had not telegraphed it was capable of. The prose was note perfect. It flashed then removed choice links, tantalizing me with what could have been, but wasn’t. What a powerful use of IF that was! I honestly mentally slow clapped by the end of the scene. It was powerful, compelling and landed like gangbusters. It was immediately followed by an abstract ‘passage of time’ sequence that was almost as affecting, and a joy to read. These two sections, back to back, minimized all my prior complaints. If I hadn’t been taking notes, it could have flushed them from my head. How much was the unique product of my choices v authorial hand I couldn’t say, but I DO say that sequence, at least temporarily, rocketed me into true engagement.

The climax fell short of that height, but in the afterglow of that super effective scene I was a lot more forgiving. I did restart the game to play again as the other well-defined character, but quickly realized the plot wasn’t going to change, and it was hard to justify a second playthrough. That said, that gift of an emotional scene well justified the play.


Played: 9/3/24
Playtime: 1hr as Lynette, 15min as Declan
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience is complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless