It can’t be true it mustn’t be true, by Charm Cochran
And so we come to the end of the RGB trilogy [EDIT: per the author’s note below, no we don’t! There are still two to come. I’ll leave the rest of the review as originally written, but the last two paragraphs especially should be taken as much more contingent given that we haven’t yet seen the cycle’s last word]. True to form, there’s significant continuity of theme, moderate continuity of characters, and a whole new gameplay idiom in this final, red-themed installment. Speaking of red, he’s once again one of the primary characters here, as “quick-tempered and immature” as he was in the last outing, though substantially less dead. The introductory screen tells us that characters “retain their colors throughout all acts”; perhaps he narrowly escaped death at his mother-in-law’s hands despite being trussed up like a prize turkey, or perhaps a better understanding is that we’re just meant to perceive continuity between the characters without fussing the details unduly. Adding to the sense of dislocation, despite the opening act of the trilogy leading off with Shakespearean language and the second having a bit of an Edgar Allan Poe vibe (albeit with some anachronistic touches of technology), we’re firmly in the modern day now, with the story opening on a chat window on a Grindr-like app warning you – teal – that the guy you just slept with – red – is a murderer.
Delightfully, your attempt to escape before he finishes his post-hook-up shower is rendered in parserlike form. There’s furniture to rifle, various locked doors and compartments, an inventory puzzle, and even a secret password. Teal, we are told, is “dense and nosy”, which as a descriptor of the prototypical parser protagonist made me laugh; yes, we’re usually feeling a bit thick as we bash our heads against the puzzles, and we certainly poke everywhere we don’t belong. The gameplay is standard enough, and the puzzles aren’t exactly brain-melters – there’s only so much you can do with 500 words, and the medium-dry-goods parserlike approach isn’t an especially plot-rich way to deploy them, so things are kept reasonably terse – but I still deeply enjoyed how surprising I found this move.
Interestingly, as far as I can tell the plot doesn’t ultimately branch based on whether you succeed at the parser section; red’s view of you in the climactic confrontation does seem to shift based on your actions, but that’s just a sprinkle of flavor on top of a cake that’s going to come out the same way every time. Again, that’s a reasonable design decision given the brutal word-count limits, and I don’t think the game would have worked as well as a capstone for the others if the ending was up in the air.
Now that the series is finished, I think I have a sense of the overall drift: once again, the target of violence in the previous act is the one directing murderous menace at the new protagonist, and once again marriage is the site of this violence (red is getting married in the morning). One doesn’t want to get too reductive and schematic about this, since there are unique elements to each game. This is the only act where we don’t see one member of a married couple threatened with death, for example, and a possible interpretation is that that’s because red is able to displace his lusts and his serial-killer tendencies out of wedlock – which would lend an anti-hedonistic tenor to proceedings that isn’t as directly present in the other acts. But still, we’re left with cycles of violence and marriage as an institution that at best is incapable of stability in the face of the storms of emotions it generates, and at worst is actually conjuring up the abuse.
Those aren’t especially novel themes, of course, but most themes aren’t – it’s the way an author uses plot, characters, and game mechanics to play them that can make something memorable, and I think the RGB cycle definitely does well on this score; the bones are solid and evocative, and the variations are well considered. I might have liked to see a bit more of a bow on the package at the end, perhaps a slightly more explicit looping back to the beginning, but that’s just a personal aesthetic preference; sadly, the omnipresent nature of intimate partner violence means that this is an idea that could just be endlessly riffed on until the heat death of the universe. And there are few games that I can think of that accomplish so much with so little, providing entertaining gameplay as well as some food for thought.