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.

Residual Income

This is a vampire heist tale with vivid imagery and a clever twist. Except I'm not fully clever enough to understand the twist.

You break into an apartment to find a writer in a future set in a technological city. The writer escapes into his panic chamber in the center of the house while you circle around, looking for information on him. You don't show up on cameras, which made me immediately think of ghost or vampire, thought it soon becoms clear.

The main big twist, which I won't write here, is about the vampire's method of feeding. What I am still pondering are the other facets of the game, not spoilers, but worldbuilding. It's not necessary to answer questions about that (ambiguous worldbuilding is often better than clearcut!) but I wonder how the place into the game. For instance, the author claims to have written a thousand or thousands of stories, and talks about not getting 'come-alive chips'. In our day, even the most prolific authors struggle to reach a thousand books (except, of course, Corín Tellado), so that combined with the idea of needing a chip to come alive made me wonder if this were an AI author, but that doesn't fit at all with the other themes. Maybe life is prolonged in this future world?

I'll try running through the game again real quick and see. Hmm, just noticed that the very first link is a different voice we tell to shut up. I'll have to see if that recurs. I also see a flower saying it looks like it comes from a virtual render, which would fit with my ai idea. I find a minor typo in the name of the writer's love; I remember the first time being surprised at the discrepancy but thought I had just misremembered (unless the typo is also intentional). The story says the guy has been writing for 50 years, so this isn't an expanded lifespan situation, this guy is really cranking about a book every few days. And the game says that his books were selling millions of copies, so is this guy a billionaire? No, because someone has his residuals, his 'owner'. So he's forced to make books in a book sweatshop?

That's why that original idea popped in my head. Couldn't the vampire be a reader, someone who desires interest and fun, so they turn to an AI that cranks out books, but finds it intellectually bankrupt? I doubt that's the intended story, but it was fun to analyze.

Anyway, I thought this interesting, fun to read, good to have in the competition.

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.