Taste of Fingers by V Dobranov
Taste of Fingers is a relatively brief choice game about a western businessman who goes to China and ends up in a horrifying virus/zombie scenario. Two features set the game apart: its focus on racism and the way it gives us two very different perspectives on which part of the population turned into zombies. For most of the game, we get the perspective of the businessman, according to which it is the people around him – presumably the Chinese – who have turned into zombies. We then get a scene narrated from the perspective of some local soldiers who see the westerners as the ones who have turned into zombies. There’s no neutral perspective telling us who is right, even though we may be tempted to go with the second interpretation, because it involves more people and fewer weird dream sequences.
Dan Fabulich has written a scathing review of the game, claiming that it severely errs in not taking a stand on racism and in merely using the theme as a backdrop for some zombie fun. I respect Dan as a reviewer, but in this case I think he’s wrong. It seems to me that Taste of Fingers takes a very clear (and utterly unsurprising) stance on racism. From the first scene onwards, we are shown the racism of the protagonist and the ways in which this makes him unable to see the Chinese around him as fully human. We also get early hints that this racism is not one-way; the use of a Cantonese slur for westerners (gwailou, literally ‘ghost guy’) is in indication that the businessman himself is also not seen as fully human.
I’d say that the parable is clear: racism is the virus. When we are infected with racism, we can no longer see the people that surround us as humans; in the world of the parable, we start seeing them as zombies. The mutual certainty that we are the living ones and the others the hungry ghosts – the basic horror plot of the game – is nothing other than racism in action. And it’s hard, I would say, not to agree with this.