Residual Income

You have been hired to break into the residence of a famous author to steal something. Breaking in is not going to be a problem - you have special abilities in that direction - but getting to your objective is going to be complicated.

Or maybe not that complicated, Residual Income is a short game featuring only a handful of locations to explore. What it lacks in complexity it makes up for in an atmosphere that suits the vaguely cyberpunk near-future setting perfectly. There is a bit of a twist, but it is well telegraphed if you have been paying attention to the little hints dropped into the writing.

The one problem I have with Residual Income is that it is rather wordy, the hard-boiled writing occasionally veers off towards the purple end of the spectrum. But the game is short enough that it doesn't have time to grate. There are some really nice little touches that make up for a couple of leaden paragraphs and when the game was over I found myself wanting more.

I’m going to struggle to write a lot about this one. I liked it. I liked it a lot. It didn’t quite go on for as long as I’d hoped it would, but it’s all relative, I suppose. The game starts out seeming sci-fi - interesting concept, I remember myself thinking, but surely that makes the game not super fun as there’s no challenge in getting away. So then you go around, trying to get in, and have an odd conversation with a woman before getting into the vault. Good writing, as well, so that definitely helped push it along beyond the extremely basic puzzle which felt a little too much like lawnmower options.

Then, the game flipped. Every single thing our PC had casually mentioned, the odd interaction, the entire concept of the game, suddenly fell into place and made so much sense. How didn’t I see that before? I remember thinking. Now, that is the best way to create a plot twist.

Of course, we are given one choice at the end and I am happy with the choice I was given, so I don’t feel I need to go back and try the alternative. However, I do feel like while the puzzle was only there to slow the pace and not feel like a kinetic novel, I wish there was something more to do in that moment - a clever puzzle that maybe even gave away another subtle hint to the condition of the PC, obviously without giving it away yet, but something to create more investment in the story before the flip.

Several times, and I must say I’m batting a thousand on this (baseball (good (what have you never left the house and encountered terrified another person that exists (I’ve scored a double century, get out of my epost)))), I’ve held off from reviewing a game, because I had an inkling that it was a trap, that any type of response was the type of response they vituperatively awaited, and I don’t need to dial up my dialup to be reminded I’m not enough, that comes without any effort at all. This is the essential dejection that faces our vampire assassin, eager to be unreachable by this predicament: “Whatever I belong to it’s been long erased from the sapphire landscape. I make my own space. I make this city my bitch. I’m important like that. I make my own importance.” The fantasy of a magic invisible, not that it’s magic, only some sort of system functioning where they have not yet defined, if you struggle enough you can squirm through their strictures unfathomable: “Just cut the connection cable connecting to the wider world. Then I’m in. / Of course it’s not that simple. I understand that. I’m ready for it.” But what if you can’t reach it? What if you’re paranticipated in some system simply loops back to this expectation of? Is there a self worthwhile if not elsewhere? “I’m a liar. I take the subway back home, ducking into the ground, worming my way through the veins of the city, a virus without a ticket, undead and self-replicating. That sounds stupid. I’m not stupid. I’m smarter than that, smarter than a smart card, I need to stop thinking.” How do you get out?

Because there’s no way to reach the man in the panic room without being one of “thousands of stories, you see, I must have done all the possible combinations. Any object you can think of, any backstory, any personality type, they’ve all been used for murder. It’s all I can see now. Swimming in my mind, drowning my thoughts…” And there’s nothing that makes you want to see if your skull has other states of matter brainreachable more than to be expected by the kinds of people who are expecting, these answerably gazing ghouls who “could be your father, the one who slaps you on the back and tells you to watch out for women. You never know what we’re thinking.” Suddenly we’re not arcane but rather an awkward phrasing, “Keep mansplaining my predicament and I’ll kill you faster” which is what they’ve always thought we were, their sentence misspoken. These experts on the correct form, they assure you from a world which you slither perpetually after afterobserver, it’s a shame the publishing industry but at least “literary launch” lies out of unabstract compression, the more you consider it the more you’re willing to accept their terms and acidify nonervator: “They don’t retrain you for the world that comes, they just wait for you to stop being part of it.” There’s no approach that doesn’t make us connected, and if we so become, then it’s justified, this vituperative “CONSTANTASSURE”. Who wants that? Who is the wanting here? This alarm that has ceased to alarm you. How do you get out?

Take this sentence, and you will, I’m sending it by certified mail so that they will tell me about you, register forever how you interacted so I don’t even have to be there to know, which is all we really want, to be somewhere else without poisoning the thereness with our presence, the United States Postal Service knows where you live and are contractually required to report back to me, I’m not sure if that’s really economical at five bucks but that’s what they asked and I paid it and it’s not really up to me if this is subsidized so that one day I Will Be Found And Recorded: “I’m just like any other. I could be on the cover of a book or magazine, but I couldn’t, because I can’t appear in photographs. That’s good; it makes me less precious. Less precious people do more important work. I’m doing real work; I’m not worried about my image. I haven’t got an image. These are my gifts.” Now yes you’re thinking that’s more than one sentence, just stop, will you, for once. Just, please, for me. So take this sentence. It’s glib, it uses a rhythmic return in lieu of posing the thought precisely as it’s poignant so that it skims through the cheap ha ha, and you could read it and get nowhere you’ve not gone before, which is you’re probably right, someone slick with it can say the phrase class consciousness while the rest of us bury ourselves in concrete until whichever blessed whenever rescues us the revolution, the next paragraph has been written before: “The job is: he’s a successful crime writer, successful enough to retire on a fortune. I’m planning to take his gifts. It’s work, mind you, more work than he’s been doing. I don’t leave people to starve. I balance out the system.” But I’m still here, holding this sentence, I am trying to hand it to you. You haven’t had the moments when you were most important make you less precious? You don’t realize what it’s like the first time you come home and look in the mirror and just see what’s been observed? Losing the frame by which imaginative. They’re taking pictures of you all the time and you’re in none of the captions which will outlive this captivity precisely. I just want to be less, if this is what it means to be less, get me there faster, more totally oblivacated. “I suffer from shiny surfaces but I don’t need them. My kitchen is a freezer and an empty space for appearances.” Mere appearance as a mastery, yes fine okay I’ll admit I’m envious of “Once he stopped looking like the image enough that people started commenting, he stopped appearing in public.” But then he wins again. That’s not right, is it, somehow we end up liquefying his soul and letting the tap drip it down the drain, or. And this proves that we’re, you know, in some way, you know that’s probably not one of the combinations he’s written, they could put us on the next cover, looking like death, that’s what they keep wanting, why. “He is smiling … but not smiling so warmly that anyone would think he is not a tough man, tough on crime, tough on his characters, toughen up by reading him. It’s a smile I’ve tried to imitate, but I can’t tell how it looks, I just have to trust. He is in repose.” Well I’m supposed to be the vampire here, why does he get all the undeath, that’s not fair, I’m supposed to be the vampire, to be undeath, to be some kind of… and he’s just reciting lore at me like I’m a thing that can be known, so, why even be, right, less precious, find something important into which, some how to get out, an event which fulminates fumeroles to new blue impossibles, codas without concordance. “I’ll break out. They won’t be able to process me. They saw how it started but they can’t judge me on what happens next.”

So how do I get there? That’s all I, less precious by the second, want. Don’t even need to take anyone with me, “I don’t have time for love. I don’t have time for any of that. Well I have time but I don’t have” and that lacking is all that needs to propel me, how should I even introduce myself lol, hiya I just have a bit of a strange question but can you tell me how to get there.