It can't be true it mustn't be true

And so we come to the end of the RGB trilogy [later edit: per feedback from the author, no we don’t! There are still two to come. I’ll leave the rest of the review as originally written, but the last two paragraphs especially should be taken as much more contingent given that we haven’t yet seen the cycle’s last word]. True to form, there’s significant continuity of theme, moderate continuity of characters, and a whole new gameplay idiom in this final, red-themed installment. Speaking of red, he’s once again one of the primary characters here, as “quick-tempered and immature” as he was in the last outing, though substantially less dead. The introductory screen tells us that characters “retain their colors throughout all acts”; perhaps he narrowly escaped death at his mother-in-law’s hands despite being trussed up like a prize turkey, or perhaps a better understanding is that we’re just meant to perceive continuity between the characters without fussing the details unduly. Adding to the sense of dislocation, despite the opening act of the trilogy leading off with Shakespearean language and the second having a bit of an Edgar Allan Poe vibe (albeit with some anachronistic touches of technology), we’re firmly in the modern day now, with the story opening on a chat window on a Grindr-like app warning you – teal – that the guy you just slept with – red – is a murderer.

Delightfully, your attempt to escape before he finishes his post-hook-up shower is rendered in parserlike form. There’s furniture to rifle, various locked doors and compartments, an inventory puzzle, and even a secret password. Teal, we are told, is “dense and nosy”, which as a descriptor of the prototypical parser protagonist made me laugh; yes, we’re usually feeling a bit thick as we bash our heads against the puzzles, and we certainly poke everywhere we don’t belong. The gameplay is standard enough, and the puzzles aren’t exactly brain-melters – there’s only so much you can do with 500 words, and the medium-dry-goods parserlike approach isn’t an especially plot-rich way to deploy them, so things are kept reasonably terse – but I still deeply enjoyed how surprising I found this move.

Interestingly, as far as I can tell the plot doesn’t ultimately branch based on whether you succeed at the parser section; red’s view of you in the climactic confrontation does seem to shift based on your actions, but that’s just a sprinkle of flavor on top of a cake that’s going to come out the same way every time. Again, that’s a reasonable design decision given the brutal word-count limits, and I don’t think the game would have worked as well as a capstone for the others if the ending was up in the air.

Now that the series is finished, I think I have a sense of the overall drift: once again, the target of violence in the previous act is the one directing murderous menace at the new protagonist, and once again marriage is the site of this violence (red is getting married in the morning). One doesn’t want to get too reductive and schematic about this, since there are unique elements to each game. This is the only act where we don’t see one member of a married couple threatened with death, for example, and a possible interpretation is that that’s because red is able to displace his lusts and his serial-killer tendencies out of wedlock – which would lend an anti-hedonistic tenor to proceedings that isn’t as directly present in the other acts. But still, we’re left with cycles of violence and marriage as an institution that at best is incapable of stability in the face of the storms of emotions it generates, and at worst is actually conjuring up the abuse.

Those aren’t especially novel themes, of course, but most themes aren’t – it’s the way an author uses plot, characters, and game mechanics to play them that can make something memorable, and I think the RGB cycle definitely does well on this score; the bones are solid and evocative, and the variations are well considered. I might have liked to see a bit more of a bow on the package at the end, perhaps a slightly more explicit looping back to the beginning, but that’s just a personal aesthetic preference; sadly, the omnipresent nature of intimate partner violence means that this is an idea that could just be endlessly riffed on until the heat death of the universe. And there are few games that I can think of that accomplish so much with so little, providing entertaining gameplay as well as some food for thought.

While I didn’t call this out in my review of the prior entry, it’s true of all three games: the cast list provided at the beginning is a great introduction to the characters, introducing the two or three people who appear in each game with two positive and two negative adjectives, giving you a sense of who they are without giving away any of the games’ secrets. Like the others, this one also has a nice UI, again with a great use of color and starting out with a well-done emulation of a messaging app.

In contrast to the slow build of the prior installment, in this one you’re given the details of the situation—and the possible danger you’re in—right away, immediately establishing tension. Other notable contrasts are that you have much more agency (or at least, there’s the illusion that you do), but instead of choosing actions to do/try, you’re picking nouns to engage with. The game has a mini world model and is focused on exploring your environment, and there’s even a small puzzle (although you can finish the game without solving it). This entry clearly belongs with the two previous games while still having its own distinct type of gameplay. As I said about #2, the range of options the player has in such a short game is impressive(Spoiler - click to show)—while, as in the prior installment, it always ends the same way, there are variations to the ending (I found three) depending on what you do or don’t do during your playthrough.

While technically this is a review of the third game, the rest of this is thoughts on the cycle (as it stands now) as a whole. As such, it has major spoilers!

(Spoiler - click to show)You may have noted that I didn’t review the first game; it wasn’t as striking to me as these two, mainly because it feels like necessary setup before things really get going in #2. As I said in my review of that one, each game builds on the previous one to recontextualize what came before it and what you think you know about the characters. Each has a different PC; the one in the first game is the current wife in a Bluebeard scenario who kills her murderous husband and escapes. However, in the second game this same woman is the villain—she murders that game’s PC, and has been doing the same to any man who gets too close to her daughter. “Men are horrors, every one,” she says in seeming justification.

When playing this entry for the first time, this statement reads as a misguided belief based on her traumatic experience with her husband, with the PC an innocent victim who we have no reason to believe deserved this. But in the third game, we’re taken back in time and shown that he’s actually a serial killer—he’s the villain now, with a new PC as his hapless victim. Just as this man is reframed, so is the woman from #1 and #2 yet again—maybe she was entirely justified in taking out her daughter’s fiance! Of course it’s much less black-and-white than that, but I loved how I was made to rethink her character twice over the course of the cycle.

It’s an excellent linked series of games. All three feature a PC trying to get out of a dangerous situation alive, and all have only a single possible outcome—someone always dies. In the first one—the only one with a woman PC—you succeed, but in the second two, you don’t. Two of the games have a serial killer meeting his end, both killed by the same woman. In the first one, a man threatens a woman’s life, but ultimately she kills him. The third one has a presumably queer man killing another queer man. The trilogy is playing with the idea of victim and perpetrator—anyone can be either, or both—and showing how context-dependent our judgments of who deserves to live or die are.

I know there are a few more games to come in the cycle, and I’m curious what they’ll do to change my view of these three and their characters. Will we see more of the PC from #3, or the daughter from #2? She feels like a foil to the Bluebeard character from the first game; him clearly evil, a perpetrator only, her clearly innocent, solely a victim. But will we learn things that call her innocence or that of #3’s PC into question? I certainly look forward to finding out.

It can’t be true it mustn’t be true is the third act of the RGB trilogy, recontextualising the events of the second act. Here, you embody another different person, in the bedroom of the man from the previous act, as you attempt to quietly leave his bedroom while he’s showering, following a warning text from a friend. Again, it switches up gameplay, going for the escape room puzzle. There are multiple ways to trigger the ending, though whether you are successful…

It didn’t click right away that this sequence wasn’t really following the previous one, though, as a whole, it made sense for it to happen now, making the events of the previous act even bleaker and somewhat more satisfying than at first play. And again, the game plays with your senses of agency and influence over the story (is this why the puzzles are relatively easy?). You get so entranced in trying to complete the game that it makes you forget about the inevitable end…

I don’t want it to end just yet… ;-;