BLOODRUST

When I was a kid in the 80s and early 90s, I read a ton of classic sci-fi, sometimes for no other reason than that’s all that was left in the fantasy and sci-fi section of the library after a couple of years of voracious plunder. I suspect things are different in these days of endless content, where a nerdy kid can find functionally infinite books and fanfic to fit whatever their precise palette of interests might be, but back in those pre-internet times I picked over all the Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, and Dick I could find, sometimes because it piqued my interest, sometimes because it was all I hadn’t read yet. And while I can’t say it qualified as my favorite sub-genre, then or now, I wound up at least respecting the way writers of that vintage took a premise and worked it out rigorously through their fiction, inspired by ideas even if they couldn’t always find themselves equally enthused by characters or a plot to give them live.

The name of BLOODRUST’s PROTAGO – sorry, protagonist – Harlan Heinlan isn’t the only reference to 50s and 60s sci-fi you’ll come across in the course of the game, but if it’s a statement of intent, it’s a veiled one. This short choice-based work is long on vibes, its downbeat text peeked at through a monochromatic TV-set frame, its repetitious bureaucracy illustrated by black-and-white photos of likewise-repetitious architectural squalor. Heinlan is a minor functionary in the bureaucracy of a post-apocalyptic regime that, of necessity or of choice, clings to rigid surveillance to maintain the semblance of order; he visits block after block of slum housing cataloguing their status, though he never recommends any action be taken to improve the obviously-terrible conditions. At least he has an outlet: after his shifts are over, he likes to visit an underground poker game where the stakes are parts of the players’ bodies, risking being maimed just to feel something.

There are some big themes at play here – consumption, complicity, cycles of abuse – but nothing is spelled out as didactically as it would have been in those books of my youth; BLOODRUST is elusive, content to communicate a feeling rather than impose an interpretation. The writing is a good fit for what the game is trying to do, maybe a bit overheated at times but effectively situating the player in the tortured subjectivity of the protagonist:

But already, I have suffered the atrocity of loss, again and again. My nerve endings are scorched and left numb, the throb within my brittle skull matched with the beat of my heart. What use is there in chasing irretrievables? My petrified will is best left to simmer in his own hot blood until it, too, turns stone cold.

Still, for all this rarefied sensation, I found the main character a bit of a cold fish. There are some glimmers of intrigue around his identity, from the brief snatches of memory he has about his mother to (Spoiler - click to show)the way his name flashes to “Harley” late in the narrative, perhaps bespeaking a gender transition or perhaps just invoking his namesake Ellison’s second-most-famous story, but in terms of what he actually does, he’s a fairly indolent protagonist, at his best invoking Bartleby the Scrivener’s metaphysical refusals, at his worst engaging in ostentatiously self-destructive behavior for reasons obscure both to him and the player. Sure, there’s something understandable about catching a glimpse of the abyss yawning below your society and then fleeing to self-abnegating helplessness, but it’s not as dramatically satisfying as screaming defiance, is it?

Truly visceral prose that conveyed the full horror of the situation could better motivate that outcome, I think, as could a more worked-out picture of Heinlan’s character – though another player who’s more susceptible to the impact of images and sound (I played with audio muted, natch) might disagree. Regardless, some great authors of sci-fi’s Golden Age didn’t lean too heavily on that stuff either, so you certainly don’t need them to succeed. But I wound up feeling about BLOODRUST like I felt about them: impressive pieces of craft on their own terms, but not the kind of thing I’d prefer if left to my druthers.