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

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.