A Conversation in a Dark Room

What do vampires have in common with the X-Men? The glib answer is “Vampire: the Masquerade” – yes, we all played it as superheroes with fangs, no, there’s nothing wrong with that – but the one I had in mind is the racism-analogy problem. See, in any genre fiction where you’ve got a distinct and insular minority who are set apart from the ordinary mass of humanity, like because they’re mutants or they drink blood, it’s tempting to lean into the subtext and start telling stories about how the ways they’re set apart resemble real-world discrimination. There can be some rich vines of pathos and thematic weight to mine here, and it can be a solid on-ramp into political awareness (I can’t definitively claim that various 80s comic books where religious reactionaries whip up vicious mobs had no impact on my current views), so I don’t mean to knock the practice by any means. But it runs into difficulties when you try to take the metaphor too literally, because at the end of the day the people who hate and fear vampires or mutants? They, uh, kind of have a point, given the extreme danger they pose to ordinary people, outside the techniques of control we accept as part of a liberal democracy. It’s not crazy to not want to live next door to a bloodthirsty creature of the night or someone who can turn your curtain rod into a deadly weapon, after all, but this gets awkward when curtain-rod guy is a stand-in for Black people or trans folks or what have you.

There are various strategies for dealing with this, of course, from steering into the skid (I haven’t read it, but I understand there’s a recent X-Men run where mutants basically set up their own nation-state, with an implicit threat of global annihilation keeping the jealous superpowers at bay) to the one Conversation in a Dark Room employs, which is to neuter the threat. Again, I understand the impulse, since the vampires in this game are clearly meant to evoke real-world marginalized groups (the bit of dialogue saying “[y]ou may even have vampire coworkers, you know. It’s not as easy as you think to spot us these days” is a bit on the nose, as is the bit about how the label “vampire” is applied as a blanket term despite the fact that most of them are “mixed”, with varying degrees of human-ness), and part of the point of the game appears to be to put the protagonist’s unexamined group-hatred of vampires under the microscope, so this wouldn’t work the same way if vampires were draining people dry willy-nilly. But there’s part of me that rebels at seeing horror’s ur-predators defanged as comprehensively as they are here: we’re told that rather than drinking human blood, they’ve created a network of humane farms that sustainably harvest non-life-threatening amounts of animal blood, as well as invented synthetic blood alternatives; oh, and they mostly don’t even reproduce, having decided that subjecting other people to their immortal curse would be mean. And as far as we’re told, vampires are a monolithic block who agree with these Jain-style precepts – given that they also don’t burst into flames in the sunlight, they come off as especially long-lived, super nice goths.

This is a shame, because with real menace on the table, Conversation in a Dark Room could be have been a nail-biter. A two-hander where a vampire and the human he’s hired to kill him chit-chat before getting down to the deed is a great premise, and there’s some queasily compelling writing in the dialogue, especially the bits that make it look like what’s happening here is a seduction:

He asks you, “Have you ever done something like this before?”

“No…No, I haven’t. Not like this. But…”

It’s also played for comedic effect – like, this is a very different kind of date:

So what do you do, anyway?" His voice broke your trance.

“Me?”

“Yes, you. What do you do? You know, for work?”

And while the vampire’s motives for choosing annihilation aren’t spelled out, and don’t seem to go too far beyond the traditional tropes of the modern vampire mythos, the author knows how to play the hits:

"He sighs. 'When you live a long time, you…experience a great array of things. You’d think the world would be full of endless opportunities and feelings and experiences, but the truth is, much of it is the same. And at the same time, some of it is impossible to replicate, and you’ll spend your whole life chasing it.'"

So the ingredients are here for a tense yet melancholy battle of wits, but some of the narrative and design choices sap the setup of its power. Again, the major issue is that the vampire just doesn’t seem scary; it’s certainly possible that he’s just gaslighting the protagonist about how woke the modern vamp is, but there’s no indication that’s the case, which makes it feel like the protagonist’s vendetta against the undead is just a thoughtless prejudice rather than anything to take seriously (at least in the two run-throughs I played, these feelings don’t stem from a specific grievance or incident that would make them feel more reasonable or psychologically grounded). Further undercutting my identification with the protagonist, they appear to be the worst journalist ever: despite their job being all about asking questions, and an apparently longstanding distaste for vampires, they seem to have never pondered, much less done research to resolve, various important matters about how vampires live and feed. For a blank-slate whose ignorance is meant to provide an excuse for world-building exposition, this would be easier to overlook, but instead, as mentioned their animus towards vampires is positioned as a major reason why they’ve taken on this assignment in the first place.

Below the narrative layer, the mechanics also make proceedings more ho-hum than they could have been. There are multiple different endings you can achieve, with your path through the story largely determined by your scores along three axes: wallow in your aggression, and you can get Hatred points, while asking lots of questions gains Intrigue and commiserating with the vampire earns Empathy. But there aren’t a lot of opportunities to gain these points, meaning I found it hard to proactively think about trying to shape the character along different extremes; instead I clicked around and hoped for the best, which led to a balanced score along the three gauges, but also an ending that paid off the setup without adding much in the way of surprises – it’s possible to overstate the value of novelty, of course, but again, this game feels to me like it wants to be structured as a thriller, which requires at least one good twist or gear-shift.

Still, all this puts Conversation in a Dark Room at “well-written vampire game with solid politics and themes,” which isn’t a bad place to be, and I haven’t even mentioned the neat visual presentation and interface bells and whistles, like a customized note-taking tool. It’s a testament to its promise that I can’t help but imagine a game that leans into, rather than away from, its darker moments, and mines richer emotions than just world-weary pathos from a premise that, again, seems very well-chosen – and it’s not like I think anyone’s actually ever solved the racism-analogy problem, it’s just that it can be more fun to read the more spectacular failures. Conversation in a Dark Room isn’t a failure by any means, but it could have stood to take a few more risks.