Residual Income

The Review-a-Thon is one of the community’s newest events, but it’s one that I already find indispensable, exposing me to awesome games that for whatever reason didn’t wind up in one of the major IF events. One of my real highlights from this year’s outing was Sleepless in the Sapphire City, an artsy, wildly subjective vampire story that smartly tweaked the central elements of the mythology to engage with the dilemmas of (post-)modernity, all rendered in incisive, polyvocal poetics (it is awesome and you should all play it). So I was excited to see that there was another installment of the story in the Comp, but also slightly worried on its behalf, because Sleepless is the kind of super-specific thing that tends to resonate super strongly with a portion of the audience but leave many others bemused, finishing somewhere in the middle of the pack with a high standard deviation.

Residual Income isn’t Sleepless Part 2, though, for good and for ill. It’s definitely a much better fit for the Comp, as it keeps the setting, a (different) vampiric protagonist, and razor-sharp wit, but tells a tighter, more cleanly-structured story with some light puzzles fleshing out the gameplay and the disjointed, fragmentary writing disciplined into more linear prose. This is a vampire on the make, speaking in clipped sentences and focusing on the positives of her condition:

I’m on the job. I’ve got work to do. I’m a businesswoman making a deal. 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.

That job is an assassination contract; the game starts you out infiltrating the apartment of a successful writer of crime fiction, hired to break into his panic-room vault and put an end to him. There’s some briskly-paced exploration as you move through a quartet of locations, clicking to investigate the one interactive feature of each; depending on whether you go clockwise or widdershins, either one revolution or two will be enough to crack the central door and enter the endgame. This interactivity serves more as a pacing element and a justification for some light environmental storytelling than as a brainteaser, but it works well for what it is, providing opportunities for the protagonist to muse on the ways her life mirrors that of her target – one an author of fictitious crimes, one the author of real ones. There are hints of backstory that lend some additional weight to the climactic confrontation, a two-handed dialogue the twists interestingly around the question of who has power in this situation, what they’re doing with it, and why.

It all works very well, which is why I feel churlish saying I was a bit disappointed. The no-nonsense protagonist of Residual Income is a good fit for a neo-noir, but I liked her a whole lot less than the damaged, struggling heroine of Sleepless. And while the prose is quite good (modulo one use of “[he] nods loquaciously” as a dialogue tag) I didn’t find it as evocative as the poetry in that earlier game. This is all down to my expectations, I think – if I’d skipped the Review-a-Thon, I don’t think I would have felt like I was missing anything and found Residual Income a tight, compelling experience. So I think the thing to do is to say it succeeds on its own terms, while crossing my fingers that someday we get a Sleepless prequel to counterbalance this sequel.