Someone Else's Story

We’ve now reached the first of a couple Goncharov games in the thon. I’m dimly aware of the provenance here; there was a social-media meme a couple years ago where folks conjured up the existence of a “lost” Scorsese film focusing on the namesake Russian gangster, and then a game jam dedicated to games fleshing out the mythos. I’m not sure how much of the core concepts were set by the organizers, or the meme – I’m assuming at least some of the details of setting and a few of the characters – but suspect that the jam will take the “interpretation of the Odyssey by someone who’s never read the Odyssey” thing I mentioned a couple reviews up to heretofore-unplumbed, kaleidoscopic extremes.

Someone Else’s Story is a short Twine game, and zooms in on one moment that surely must come early in the film: you play Sofia, a woman with some connection to the Italian mob who’s given the task of weaseling into the good graces of Goncharov’s wife Katya at a cocktail party to see what she knows about what the Russians are up to. I found the backstory here somewhat confusing – there are a lot of different characters name-checked, and the details of who you are and what kind of move is being made are left vague – but this isn’t a mystery or thriller where you need to carefully sift through information and make high-stakes deductions. No, all of that setup is basically just there to create background vibes for a flirtation-with-intent pas des deux with Goncharova.

Sexually-charged conversations with an undercurrent of danger are a staple of mob movies, of course, even if the details here would strain credulity if one took the meme seriously (forget the lesbian subtext, has Scorsese ever shot a scene that’s just two women talking?) The game does a good job of playing this trope; the descriptions convey Katya’s sexiness, and the player’s given a couple of satisfying opportunities to take a risk and make their interest known. Meanwhile, while the men’s criminal business is never openly spelled out, the writing conveys the possibility of violence and its potential to swallow you up, too, if you’re not careful:

"'Most people don’t want to get on the wrong side of my husband,' she says. 'But you—you don’t care. I like that.'

"You wonder if perhaps it would have been wise to care."

While there are clearly mechanics that track how much you’re leaning into seduction vs. fishing for information vs. playing it safe and building a rapport to exploit later on, the choices never feel mechanical; the fiction effectively pushes you to try to balance your disparate goals, and it makes sense that there’s rarely a conversational gambit without tradeoffs or opportunity costs. My one complaint about the implementation of the battle of wits is that on my first go-round, it was over surprisingly quickly – the main conversation is just a sequence of four or five choices, so while I thought I was starting out with a cautiously considered opening to feel Katya out, in fact I was just frittering away my scarce opportunities to push forward. But on the flip side, the game’s brevity means it was easy to replay, armed with the knowledge of the ticking clock, and even that ambivalent, premature ending works well on its own terms.

Of course, partially that’s because this is, as mentioned, an early establishing scene: it sets up the relationship between two characters and clarifies the stakes for when they next come together. Whether Katya will be eager to pursue an assignation with an enticing stranger, or will find herself trying to shield a nosy interloper from the consequences of her own curiosity, the consequences will all play out off-screen. So too are we not privy to how Sofia will navigate the conference with the boss who assigned her her task, though notably in none of the game’s endings does she get any definitive information from Katya. This range of potential outcomes combined with the lack of narrative resolution mean that the game is essentially ambiguous – but that’s not a flaw so much as further confirmation that, as Katya says, this is fundamentally someone else’s story: Scorsese’s camera will lock onto the husbands and capos, while the struggles, loves, and hazards of the women are confined to the margin.