Blood and Sunlight

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.