Sleepless in the Sapphire City

This is really very good.

I know my schtick is usually to dress things up, do some tapdancing with a barely-related personal anecdote or set up a joke that pays off at the very end, or at minimum lay the groundwork for judgment instead of just announcing it. But here we are – and I’m saying this about a linear Twine game that uses vampirism as a not-even-thinly-veiled avenue to talk about loss, alienation, dysphoria, and the compromises we make to get through what we optimistically call our lives, at the level of concept there’s not much about Sleepless in the Sapphire City that’s very interesting, much less novel, at all.

The secret sauce, unsurprisingly, is the writing. I copied at least half a dozen full passages from the game into my notes, since they stand on their own as tiny poems and I wanted to be able to read them again. Here’s one of the first, and one of my favorites:

We say it’s dark
but look at that:
midnight
and the sky glows.

It’s not a haiku, metrically speaking, but it does everything you want a haiku to do. It’s also a nice bit of exposition, because the sky isn’t just bright at night due to ambient light pollution, but because the game takes place in a world with two moons, reflecting double the sunlight at the unhappy vampires below. That’s not just pointless worldbuilding, though, because that in turn sets off a rumination from the main character, who wonders if somewhere there’s a universe with one moon that’s more peaceful, because people can sleep better at night and the oceans are calmer. It’s got the structure of a joke, but also serves as a thematic reminder that one person’s worst-case status quo is another’s yearned-for escape.

Here’s another one:

I’m too aware
of where I live
I don’t say
“I live in a body”
I should say
“I live in a box
stacked up with other boxes
in a whole mountain of boxes
all the same
all different
and I’m a letter
in a word
in a sentence
on a page
in a newspaper
on a film reel
in a library
on a street of libraries
and we used
to be a novel”
I should say that
if I could speak to anyone
without leaving bite marks.

Reduced to its semantic content this is trite, but with these words and this meter, it’s a devastating statement of alienation and isolation.

I should say that the game isn’t all vibes and self-contained poems. Actually, there’s a reasonable amount of infodumping about bespoke vampire lore, but mirabile dictu, it’s actually a unique spin that updates the tropes while maintaining close ties to the traditions that birthed them. The cleverest bit here is the take on vampiric weaknesses: it’s not sunlight but the blue light of LCD screens that’s anathema to the undead, leaving them cut off from the screen-mediated society of humans; the symbols of faith that harm vampires are no longer religious ones, but corporate brand logos; and it’s not literal stakes but stakeholders, that is, connection with people who give a damn, who are the deadliest danger. Again, this has the shape of a joke, but is actually a canny way of repositioning the relationship between the vampiric protagonist and the elements of the living world, both good and bad, that will harm them, turning the logistics of managing an undead life into something more broadly resonant, into mythology.

There’s a plot too – it’s simple in its outlines, but effective, taking the protagonist from a childhood idyll through bereavement before ending in a squalid, heartbreaking climax. Or actually, not ending there, because my only complaint about Sleepless in the Sapphire City is that after it builds to a searing turning point, it keeps going for another ten minutes, with those final minutes largely return to the register of the opening, rather than sitting with the enormity of what’s happened. From a certain point of view, that’s thematic – pretending that a just-committed crime is no big deal is a classic coping strategy, after all, as is pretending that sleeping with someone you just slept with was likewise no big deal, and protagonist’s just done something that partakes of both those things – but I still found it a little disappointing.

That ending is a real weakness, but I minor one, I think. I return to where I started this review: Sleepless in the Sapphire City is really very good, exactly the reason why I keep coming back to IF decade after decade.