Bloodrust by Orx
I thought Bloodrust did a nice job at setting a particularly creepy and bleak atmosphere, from descriptions, to audio choices, to text and other visual choices. It has been a few days since I have played through the game, but going into an elevator and to some nondescript room to gamble with a creepy dude(?) still lingers in my mind. Why am I going to gamble off my body parts in a game that seems obviously rigged, or at best, stacked against me by odds alone? I do not know. Seems like a bad idea.
The game felt like it walked the perimeter of a deeper, more complex world. At times I wish it dove deeper. I found myself not really understanding what the blackjack dealer was actually revealing to me in a critical mid-game scene. There are some context clues for you to fill in the blanks, but I felt disoriented in the world while my character walked through it with more certainty, it seems. I don’t say this as a critique necessarily, just as an observation. There is power in that disconnect, and neglecting diving into complex world building keeps the story moving along, leaving you with just enough to get an idea. As they say in horror movies: never actually reveal the monster. The lack of knowing is so much worse than any creature we can come up with.
The lack of autonomy here feels meaningful, and reminds me of how we sell parts of ourselves, like our data and our privacy, away at the chance to feel things in our digital age. Even as I write and post this, I feel vulnerable. For a long time the lack of scaling has been our safety, but now we live in a time where mass data scraping and ingestion, and LLM interpretation, it means that people can leverage even just these reviews and glean a lot of sensitive information about me. I could easily be targeted and manipulated, so why post write anything online at all when it comes with so much danger? Nothing to gain, everything to lose. Why play? It is the same paradox of the main character in Bloodrust: I can’t hep myself.