El Ruido, by Jen Lee
I always appreciate it when a game puts its statement of purpose right on the first screen you see – it makes my job as a reviewer much easier, for one thing, but it also helps me lock into the right mindset with which to approach. Sometimes this comes in the blurb, sometimes in the about text, but El Ruido manages the trick quite eloquently, by having the two verbs available to you in the opening passage be USE and GLOWER. USE shifts from scene to scene – sometimes it’s CONFIDE, sometimes SLAP – but GLOWER is a constant companion. Sure, I suppose practically speaking it’s just EXAMINE with some vibes on top, since when you run your sneering glance over someone or something, the game obliges you with more details on how they’re reacting to your stare (or backstory on how they came to be stared at by you), but man, those vibes are good.
See, the setup here is that you’re in a telenovela – and instead of the hero, you’re playing Yesenia, the villainess. There have been a few soap-opera IF games before – at least, I know of Craverly Heights – but it’s not exactly a well-covered niche in general, and the world of Mexican soaps has heretofore gone entirely unplumbed. I’m of course familiar with the overall conventions here, but I confess I haven’t seen any directly, so the game’s prompting for how I could act helped me get in character. And there’s a lot of fun to be had by leaning into your character’s vendetta against her two-timing former paramour, who’s decided to go straight and taken up with a bloodless, virginal waif:
Her frail hand shakes for the security of Alejandro’s grasp, who sits beside her hospital bed. Seeing them together makes your blood boil from your place outside in the hallway, especially that smile you see on Selena’s face through the glass and barbed wire. The doorknob is just an arm’s length away.
It would be easy for the prose to be so overheated it takes you out of the game, or conversely, so dry that it pushes you out of the mood, but El Ruido deftly occupies the middle space between the two extremes; I always looked forward to the next plot twist, the next outrageous opportunity to show off my malice.
That’s not the only area where the design is nicely judged, either. This is a Texture game, a system that’s a sort of parser/choice hybrid allowing you to drag a limited set of passage-specific verbs onto selected words in the passage to either move the story forward, or add more detail to the current passage. But while in theory the interface is flexible enough to allow for a variety of approaches, in practice most of the Texture games I’ve seen are fairly linear, with most interactions providing a bit of additional context but not providing much in the way of gameplay. El Ruido, by contrast, gives the system a workout: the first few scenes allow you to move around a bit rather than heading straight into confrontation, and there were a couple of times where using one verb on a particular word opened up a new word that could be usefully interacted with via a different one, making for a light puzzle mechanic. Add in some significant branching, and a finale sequence where too much futzing around can run down the timer, and there’s some solid interactivity here to engage the player.
Poking at the edges of the game instead of barreling straight through is a rewarding process, too. The protagonist has been haunted by a strange noise that seems to strengthen or recede depending on how much she commits to her role as a woman scorned and out for vengeance, and assessing exactly how and why that’s happening helps you make sense of a few out-of-place details and sudden, unexplained endings that can cut off the story before it fully develops. The ultimate twist isn’t hugely original, I’ll admit – it’s basically telenovela-flavored Westworld – but it’s a satisfying one nonetheless. It all makes for a package that’s as much fun as it seems like it’s going to be, and much smarter than it needed to be, too (I bet that’s how Yesenia thinks of herself, too).