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Review
Played: 7/24/24
Playtime: Act I (2x) 5min; Act II (3x) 5min; Act III (4x) 8min
I made the call to review these three Acts together, given their relative brevity and presumed linkages in the author's RGB Cycle. After playing them, I stand by that decision. These are three very short games, linked in formatting and variations on horror themes. In each, you are playing a potential victim’s role in a horror story. The setups are economically conveyed, crisply establishing dramatis personae and blurry setting, not wasting a word on unnecessary details or background. The dramatic resolution of the current scene is the whole focus, and given their dire urgency, appropriately so. Background details are dribbled out organically based on your choices and responses. It is a powerful, very successful approach to horror this short.
In the first act, a wife is confronted by a monstrous (pirate) husband. The second showcases a man trying to find his way out of darkness. The last is a man responding to a panic-inducing revelation. The pieces are thematically linked, though they share no common characters or setups. The ‘cycle’ in question seems deliberately named, and I am going to show my whole ass trying to explain what I could be completely wrong about. The name "RGB Cycle" carries two meanings I think. The more playful of the two is the use of color implicitly and explicitly in the works. On one level it is purely a graphical/presentation choice, implicitly linking characters across these narratives. On another level (and here I risk creating theme in whole cloth), each act is a different shade (ah? ah?) of culpability and agency in monstrous circumstances.
I am running out of non-spoiler room here. Each Act presents a life-or-death scenario of (Spoiler - click to show)predatory murder. Each Act features subtly different gameplay, from dialogue trees to modest puzzle solving, to dark room exploration. Each Act also provides (Spoiler - click to show)a single ending while perhaps head faking multiple endings, as far as my limited playthroughs could determine. When individual games do this, there is clearly a point to it. If the point is not surprising and/or thematically laser focused, it can land with an ‘eh, ok, I get it.’ When a TRYPTYCH of games do this, their impacts expand and multiply. When the genre of those games is horror, that choice rings loud and impactful. In particular, the variance in scenarios and motivations underline that the situations kind of don’t matter. The different roles of the 'colors' underline that personalities don't matter. Motivations and innocence don’t matter. These are all tones of a horrible, horrible rainbow whose overriding arc is impervious to its specific shadings (and most distressingly, impervious to (Spoiler - click to show)attempts to alter it).
That is a really cool conceit, deftly implemented, and landed for me like so much more than the sum of its parts. So yeah, three Acts cresting into an overarching message of effective horror. One review. Would be weird to only review Broadway productions scene by scene, wouldn’t it?
I would be remiss if I didn’t observe that Act II’s title is maybe my favorite IF title of all time. Certainly of those I can remember at the moment.
Boy will my face be RED if the last installments of this cycle contradict what I'm saying here. I'm getting GREEN in the gills thinking about it. And kinda BLUE. At least you know I'm not too YELLOW to post my thoughts!
