Metallic Red by Riaz Moola

[SomeOne2 (Max Fog)]

I just played Metallic Red; it’s pretty interesting. I got very strong Howling Dogs vibes, but less dark and dystopic and more nostalgic. I quite liked it, and although there were quite a few full stop errors, there were no typos.

One thing I didn’t understand though: were the dreams meant to be reflective of past events? The Coke/Pepsi dream was pretty weird.

[Cerfeuil (KADW)]

I played it yesterday and liked it. Really atmospheric, and I’ve also got a weakness for scifi stories about being alone and isolated in the cold frontier of space, etc. But despite the concept, it had a comforting feel to it. It felt like the protagonist has gotten used to living alone in a tiny ship with no real-life human contact for months and somehow learned to enjoy it, or at least accept that this is how life will be. Less “depression hovel” and more “Henry David Thoreau doing his hermit thing”, finding freedom within a narrow, solitary existence.

It’s been a while since I played Howling Dogs, so I thought of Skulljhabit, another Porpentine game that has the same structure of a repetitive day-to-day cycle broken up by unique events. There’s way more daily variation in this game than in Skulljhabit, though.

The ending was cool too: At the start I thought there was no specific goal, but the end puts your actions into context. This is the story of someone who braves the vacuum of space for months, just so they can talk to people who care for them a lot, and consider them part of the community, to say “I’m no longer interested”. The compound felt warm and inviting, which made the decision at the end more of a twist. At the same time, I can get behind that decision because of all the details gradually revealed throughout the story: the wobbly relationship with the father, the ambiguity of the dreams, and the general sense of fatigue permeating the entire story. Even in the compound itself, there’s a disconnect between you and everyone else. The protagonist is someone suited to isolation, who wants to cut a specific tie connecting them to a life they no longer want, and they put in the effort to make that happen. I guess I’d describe the ultimate mood as “pleasantly melancholic”.

I’m a fan of how the game doesn’t reveal information about the protagonist until they act, so you’re left guessing about the wider context of who they are and what they’re doing until the end. Even a bit after the end.

I read the dreams as intended to reveal something about the protagonist’s mental state. So like all dreams they’re probably based on things that actually happened, but not completely accurate to real life.

Also, huh, I didn’t mean to write that much. I guess this could be an official review or something.

[VictorGijsbers]

Very nice game. Here’s what I wrote in my review thread, much of it in line with what @Cerfeuil wrote above.

At first, there are strong vibes of howling dogs. It’s a Twine game set in a small cell-like environment – though this time it’s a space ship – where we perform boring daily tasks and kill the time, while the environment seems to be decaying around us, and we experience strange dreams at night. A cookie cutter recreation of the original Twine sensation, then? Well, no, not at all.

The first difference that becomes apparent is the vibe. There’s no sense of true alienation here, nor of helplessness, nor of confusion. The protagonist owns this space ship, even if its not much, and they have a measure of control over how they live – if they can arse themselves to do it, they can tidy things up, grow plants, do some exercises. Basic self-care, sure, but there’s a sense of ownership and accomplishment. “I can give you the gift of meaningful labour,” is what a character will say to them later on, or words to that effect; and then too it is the mundane things, mixing a salad dressing and helping clean up a kitchen, that anchor life and self.

Basic self-care, and emails. It’s a good storytelling device, used often because it works: messages coming to us from outside to paint a fuller picture of the world and our life. There’s a father in the background, a friend who would like to meet us but is also willing to support us if we need to absent ourselves for a while, and a surprising amount of information about esotericism, including tarot, but mainly focused on some ancient Greek cultic beliefs which also inform some of the protagonist’s dreams. The juxtaposition of spaceships and Eleusinian Mysteries is surprising, but it works.

It turns out that we are travelling to a cult that made a base under the ground in some small, otherwise uninhabited planet. The cult is not scary at all; in fact, it feels a bit like coming home, seeing some old friends, sleeping in your old bed, having a sense of community. But the protagonist is here with a specific goal: they want to renounce their membership. The want to do undo the rituals, unsee the revelations, return to the state of the uninitiated. It’s not clear whether this is possible, although there’s certainly nobody who tries to stop them. It’s perhaps also not clear what it means.

But, perhaps, if it means anything, it is renouncing dreams of what is beyond this world in order to truly anchor ourselves in meaningful labour. As they are returning to the awfully mundane, we must imagine them happy.

As you can no doubt tell, I liked Metallic Red. I especially admire its understated, subtle approach. There are wild elements here (space ships! cults!) but it handles them in a way that is the exact opposite of pulp, going instead for the quotidian, for the mundane, for the abandonment of grand grand dreams that mean to pull us away from the solid core of our very material life. We need no blind seers to show us the way.

[wolfbiter]

cross-posting my review

Interestingly, I wasn’t particularly reminded of Howling Dogs until I saw others mention it–yes, you eat dispenser-food etc. but as Victor points out the mood is very different.

If there was any specific connection between the plot and the dreams I’m not sure if I got it, but I thought they were more conveying the PC’s mood / anxieties.

@Cerfeuil

I’m a fan of how the game doesn’t reveal information about the protagonist until they act, so you’re left guessing about the wider context of who they are and what they’re doing until the end. Even a bit after the end.

Good point! I also enjoyed that although I hadn’t thought about it as such. And it’s satisfying because what the PC ends up doing feels like it matches what we’ve learned about them.

[mathbrush (Brian Rushton)]

Adding my review here:

Mathbrush's 2024 IFComp Review Thread

Metallic Red by Miaz Roola Being alone or in a small group in space is a classic story setup. Even before space people did it with ships, like Robinson Crusoe or Swiss Family Robinson. Movies like The Martian or Gravity, podcasts like Vast Horizon or Wolf 359 or Girl in Space, and IF games like Protocol or Seedship all deal with isolation in space. To me, that says that there’s something about the experience that satisfies some primal human urge for self-evaluation and discovery, like a spirit…