Blood and Sunlight

When I was in fourth grade–I can recall reading it in my assigned seat–I remember loving a book about a boy my age who befriends a vampire girl. He was an awkward, lonely boy, and the girl was a mysterious outsider. There were anxieties. Will her parents eat him when he comes over for dinner? Perhaps they were older–sixth grade, perhaps. I think young people were younger in the eighties. There was no internet, as only one obvious and simple indication. There was a sweetness to their attractions (fascinations). It was mostly expressed as shyness.

I loved the story. As an unhappy child, I believed that only something supernatural or miraculous could change my life, which was in those days hopelessly real. I wanted something–someone–to draw me into a secret, undiscovered world where magic existed. That never happened, and perhaps I was right! I never became a happy young person.

I don’t think I was alone in my feelings. Thanks to democratized distribution of content and fan-made works, we can see that the idea of personal relationships with the supernatural has wide appeal. We see it in traditional media, too. Surely we have not forgotten–even if some of us remain confused by it–the success of the Twilight franchise.

This interest intersects with figurative presentations of monsters, perhaps especially vampires. Maybe vampires most of all. What does it mean to be devoured? What might it mean to be excluded from society? To never see “the light of day?” To have socially forbidden hungers?

These questions all pulse through the veins of vampire fiction, even when the dangers are subsumed within a nonthreatening package. So it was with my grade school book, and so it is too with Blood and Sunlight. On its surface, Blood and Sunlight seems concerned a logistical problem: will the protagonist, Zach, get home before daybreak? The answers in this multi-route games mostly answer “no.” The question might be robbed of its teeth: Zach isn’t in any danger of turning to ash. Still, he will and does suffer if he chooses to stay.

His drunk significant other, Lyle, suggests that he stay, but they're too intoxicated to add much to the conversation. This is really a discussion that Zach has with himself: “why can’t I be like everybody else,” he seems to wonder. He can’t, obviously, but how far is he willing to go to try? The player can choose to make him sick. Is this romance? I was reminded of Ellie and Riley’s doomed fantasy of madness unto death in The Last of Us: Left Behind, but those characters chose to fall apart together. Here, it’s just Zach.

I found in this story an inversion of my own grade-school fascination with the adolescent vampire girl. My young self wanted to be pulled out of the world, but Zach pushes himself hard to be in it. I think Blood and Sunlight appears–misleadingly–light, but deeper themes are there, for those who look. A thought-provoking and rewarding bite!

Blood and Sunlight is one of three games in a series. The author notes that it also stands on its own, and this is how I experienced it. In this game you play Zach, a 23-year-old vampire who must decide whether or not to spend New Year’s Eve at the house of his partner Lyle.

Some of the most charged vampire tropes (blood drinking, forbidden desires, sleeping in coffins, etc.) are rendered rather benign and quotidian in this game. Spending the night with your ~lover~ (using that term to be dramatic) is, in Blood and Sunlight, more about discreetly trying to figure out whether or not to borrow their toothbrush (for your fangs?) while they’re passed out. Being turned to ash in the morning sun is, in this game, more like trying to make your way home on new year’s day with a very bad hangover. Because, as we learn, sunlight won’t kill you, but it will make you pretty sick. Waking up in Lyle’s bedroom, therefore, means waking up without the blackout curtains and other lightproofing measures you’ve implemented at your own place. It means navigating Lyle, Lyle’s sister, and Lyle’s Mario Kart-loving cousins while trying to call an uber and trying not to barf or otherwise embarrass yourself and/or Lyle.

Defusing vampire tropes really opens up the story, and gives the player a lot more room to explore what the game really seems to be about: your attitude toward aspects of your identity and your body that you can’t change, but that impact those you love. You can be stoic and isolate yourself; you can endure discomfort for the sake of your partner–but in a passive aggressive way; you can endure–but in a sincere way; you can accept help or not; you can feel sorry for yourself or not. And you can do all of these things in a way that’s jumbled together and even contradictory, which I thought was just terrific. Throughout the game, I felt like I was really just doing my best to navigate a stressful and fluid situation, sometimes being whiny, then immediately after that being stoic, and then totally contradicting myself. I never felt like the choices were trying to maneuver me onto one of four or so distinct “tracks”--or that there were “good” endings or “bad” endings.

A small thing: As someone who hasn’t (yet) played the other Blood and games, I felt like I wanted a little better understanding of the context and significance of what Lyle is asking of Zach. Would this be the very first time that Lyle and Zach spend the night together (in which case it’s presumably a big step for them)? Or is it just the first time they’d spend the night at Lyle’s house instead of Zach’s (a big step, but in a different way). I assumed the latter was the case. If it had been their first ever night together, my choices might have been a little different, skewing more toward agreeability at the expense of my own comfort.

Finally, I just wanted to add that the family scenes were described with such warmth, which really underscored Zach’s loneliness and his longing for connection. I’m looking forward to playing the other Blood and games and perhaps even future installments? Lyle was so sweet and Zach was such a relatable overthinker. I’m really rooting for the two of them.

I’ve been at the IF-reviewing game for a while now: over twenty years stem to stern, and even if you discount the interregnums it still comes to about a decade. There’s been a lot of opportunity over all that time to interrogate my methods and their foibles, so I feel like I’m generally pretty self-aware about how I approach reviews. But there remain a couple of black holes that still lurk within this otherwise-well-surveyed galaxy, jealously guarding the secrets yet concealed within their Schwarzschild radii (forgive the tortured metaphor, my son’s been into space stuff lately so it’s all been top of mind). The one apposite to this, my final review of the Thon, is the mysterious ability some games have to make me stick to my first ending rather than replay them.

It’ll shock no one who’s followed my reviews that I have a bit of a completionist streak – OK, I’ve exhausted literally bit of content for every Assassin’s Creed game that came out before my son was born, down to finding all those stupid feathers that were floating over Venice in AC2 and clearing every map icon, however mundane, in Origins and Odyssey, so perhaps “a bit” is a misnomer. So it’s probably unsurprising that if a piece of IF advertises itself as having multiple endings, or significant branch points, my natural inclination is to check those out, and that inclination is even stronger when I’ve decided to review something; obviously an analysis informed by an understanding of a game’s structure and the full range of its narrative possibilities is going to be more incisive! Of course, I’m not slavish about this, if a game is super long or there are options that I’m just deeply uninterested in (see, e.g., “evil” paths), I’m more likely to be one and done. But when playing a short game that clearly signposts that it changes quite a lot based on player choice, and that maintains a minimum level of quality such that a replay feels like it would be reasonably rewarding, I’m typically happy to do so. Except every once in a while I just don’t feel like it, for reasons that I think aren’t *just* laziness but remain frustratingly hard to pin down.

Whew, we’ve finally circled around to Blood and Sunlight. This is a short Ink game that’s part of a series (I haven’t played any of the others) focusing on Zach, the vampire PC, and Lyle, his lover. This installment sees them firmly coupled up, but seemingly still in the early stages of the relationship, facing a milestone: there’s a party at Lyle’s place where Zach is meeting their family, it gets late, and Lyle asks Zach to stay the night, which he’s never done before. The dilemma isn’t about sex, to be clear – Lyle conks out a little too early for that to be on the table – but about Zach’s vampiric nature: Lyle doesn’t (yet?) have blackout curtains or any of the other niceties the discerning Nosferatu arranges for their lair. Fortunately, Zach isn’t the kind of vampire who’ll burst into ash if they catch a stray ray, but sunlight is enough to cause discomfort and nausea, so there are reasons beyond potentially-fraught interpersonal dynamics to hesitate to sleep over.

All of this is well explained within the game, even for a newcomer to the series – I felt like I had a solid handle on the characters’ respective personalities (Zach is a bundle of anxiety, Lyle is gentle and solicitous; Lyle’s family members are very much secondary but still manage to be appealing) and a clear view of the situation. Details of their backstory don’t really come on-screen, but given that those are probably the purview of the other two games, that’s fair enough. I will admit that I wanted a bit more worldbuilding on how exactly vampirism is meant to work, especially given that the treatment of sunlight is idiosyncratic – in particular, I wasn’t sure whether feeding generally entailed some form of predation or if ethical vamping was a thing, since that would have helped me get a better handle on how much of Zach’s angst is due to his personality rather than his situation – but all things being equal I feel like a lighter touch is better than a heavier one on this score.

Speaking of things that are light or heavy, there are a lot of choice points in what’s a reasonably slight vignette: beyond narratively important ones like deciding whether or not to accede to Lyle’s entreaties, you’re given quite a lot of scope to define Zach’s attitude and mood. These tend to range from more self-loathing ones, where you draw back from others’ attempts to reach out to you, to happier choices where you disbelievingly accept the love and care that you’re offered (as I said, Zach is angsty, you understandably don’t get completely low-key options).

It’s all well-presented, in prose that’s unshowy but evidences a good eye for detail and foregrounds emotion:

"You both get up, and Lyle laughs when they notice your pajamas, informing you they were a gag gift from Daph. You let them hit the bathroom first, and you pull on yesterday’s clothes, glancing yourself over in Lyle’s mirror afterward; that whole no-reflection thing is as much a lie as the burn-up-in-the-sun shit. Your eyes are a little hollow, the corners of your mouth drooping. You put on a smile, grinning so hard it becomes macabre, and when your face goes slack again you look a little less dour. Then, too antsy to just sit and wait, you crack the door."

It all adds up to a satisfying, nicely made game, albeit in my first playthrough it felt a bit slight – I generally stuck to the choices that saw Zach accepting Lyle’s overtures and making a reciprocal effort to connect with them, and while that course did have some bumps along the way, notably some barfing and a need to push down feelings of inadequacy, it felt decidedly low-drama both in terms of conflict and outcomes; by no means was Zach and Lyle’s relationship transformed by these events, it just took a solid but small step forward.

I suspect that players who leaned into other versions of Zach would find their experience quite different, however: a vampire who slinks home alone or awkwardly runs out first thing in the morning would likely see this night as more of a turning point, potentially threatening this promising relationship or just offering a poignant reminder of the ineluctable curse of undeath. If I felt like my playthrough was low-drama because the main takeaway was that Zach just needs to relax a little, well, those other playthroughs are presumably right there.

And yet that’s all speculation, since I left things there. Objectively, there’s no real reason I can give for not exploring my options: I sincerely think the game would change a bunch, and my opinions would be more well-rounded, if I gave it another whirl, and I enjoyed my first go-round so I’m pretty sure I’d like a second, too, even if I’d be spending more of it wincing at Zach’s refusal to get out of his own head. But, well, see above – after hovering my cursor over the “restart” button a couple of times, I didn’t wind up clicking. I guess even if you’re usually a pretty responsible person, there are times when just going with the flow still somehow feels like the right thing even when you know objectively it’s not. And if I can’t figure out why that is for myself, it’s easy to sympathize with Zach for being in the same boat.