"Red String Club" is a dream of a rainy night

Text author Shiraha Night Tea Party Tropexxx

preface

When you think of cyberpunk, what comes to mind? Is it the dense public buildings, the clutter of the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, or the final form of people in Ghost in the Shell.

In recent years, games with cyberpunk as the background have been launched one after another, and the promotion has earned enough eyeballs to make players afraid of the yellow background announcement, "Cyberpunk 2077", "The Last Night", which has been released due to the break of the capital chain, and domestic production

Cyberpunk pixel game "Spy in the Mist", "Cloudpunk" with driving a flying car to deliver a courier as the core gameplay... These games or

Whether it has brilliant and delicate light and shadow, or has a strong dystopian color in cyberpunk, or wins with the protagonist's personal heroism, "Red String Club", which also has a cyberpunk background, starts from the small theme of "whether human emotions should be influenced by the outside world", telling a small story in a small club in the context of the monopoly of large enterprises.

(*Special reminder: the following content includes some spoilers, please read as appropriate)

Prisoner of the Red Strings of Destiny

Most of the game is played in the form of dialogue, interspersed with bartending, pottery and telephone decryption.

Most of the games that are played in the form of dialogue are also many, interactive movie games mainly choose to change the ending, and Detroit Change and Invisible Guardian are good interactive movie games. When each choice can affect the fate or goodwill of the protagonist and the characters around us, we tend to be more cautious (of course, sometimes directly messed up).

Unlike other games, The Red String Club adds a bartending element to the dialogue, where there will be different guests in the club, and you need to bring up a perfect cocktail to influence the mood of the guests, so as to slip information out of their mouths, advance the storyline, and prepare for one of the protagonists, Brandis, to foil the plans of Superland.

The game follows a linear structure of "different emotions – different conversations – different information exchanges" to develop the story, we play as Donovan, the bartender and owner of the Red String Club, exchanging information with different guests in this club, Donovan laughs at himself as "the prisoner of the red string of fate", he is called "the person beyond fate" by the super intelligent robot Akala who secretly controls everything, in the Red String Club, each of our choices is the node leading to the final ending, If the player has the heart to pull the plot record to the end, only to find that the final node has been decided from the beginning, intricate red strings interlaced, the ending is already doomed, we may be able to exchange information through dialogue, so that others can survive, but just like the red strings converge at one point, no matter how to pluck the textile red strings, we will never be able to save our lover.

The combination of pottery and transformation is also a highlight of the game, in the game player-controlled Akara-184 can implant components that can transform the mind for people from all walks of life, different components have different roles, such as the "Enchanted Witch" component can increase the charm of online social networks, the "Senior Official" component can greatly enhance the persuasion skills, etc., but as guests face new problems after installing the components and return to the clinic, we can't help but wonder if it is really right to exert external forces to change the mind. This also laid the groundwork for the later plans of Chaolu Company.

Incidentally, in this Ultra-Continental clinic, a member of a rebel group mixed in, causing the escape of Akala-184, a member named Ariadne, who is believed to have been heard by friends who have played Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Her name derives from the classical mythology of Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos of Crete, who used embroidery thread and a magic knife to help her lover, the Athenian prince Theseus, kill Minotaurs, a monster trapped in a labyrinth, but was eventually abandoned on a desert island by Theseus, who was powerless to confront the gods, and the story behind this name seems to echo the theme of "The Red String Club", suggesting a fateful and tragic ending.

The final telephone puzzle, the scene is fixed on the superluminal company building, Brandeis needs to imitate the voice of the superluminal company director through the voice changer to find the password to detonate the building, this part of the puzzle is relatively simple, it should be noted that the front for the two superlubber executives implanted the transformation is different, the back of the dialogue will be different.

The plot is made to God, and the flaws are not hidden

As a small-volume cyberpunk pixel game of only 261MB, Red String Club has a relatively simple gameplay, and requires players to remember the details of the dialogue process to answer Akara's questions, and for players with poor memory (such as me), answering questions is as painful as being pumped by a teacher when they were students.

In the decryption of the phone call, it is necessary to remember the relationship between the company's executives, the scene does not have any switching here, the whole process is slightly complicated, and it is easy to lose patience. The final name password also needs to be converted to Chinese and English, and non-native English speakers may need to react to it before they can be solved.

But the excellent plot makes up for the shortcomings in this regard, and it can be said that it is a game with a main plot. The previous process paves the way for the tragedy that follows, and the love in the front is not the core of the story until it is wrapped in fate and becomes the theme. Donovan taught Akara what love is, what freedom is, what is death, and can say lightly, "I don't want to erase sorrow, and sadness is also a kind of beauty." Donovan eventually chose to forget everything, but the tragic ending was already doomed at the beginning, and Brandeis fell on a rainy night, muttering to himself: "Donovan, are you listening?" ”

Gods Will Be Watching and Essays on Empathy produced by the same studio are also in this style, in which empathy essays are jokingly called the electronic peripherals of the "Red String Club", and several of the stories in it are also the prototypes of the Red String Club, such as pottery and phone calls. Unfortunately, neither of these games is currently in Jane.

But can we really forget?

The whole game took about five or six hours, and I finished the game in two days, and finally the bell of the wine still seemed to echo in my ears, but the game was automatically closed. I don't know who has said: People move forward by forgetting, but can we really forget?

Just like the ending song of EVA, as Makoto leads Shinji out of the train station, the former autistic warrior finally becomes an adult, "One last kiss" accompanies the end of a generation's childhood, which has a sentence "Forgetting れたくないこと, Don't want to forget Things Forget れられない人, people who can't forget", can these really be forgotten?

Remember "Bionic Man Dreams of An Electronic Sheep?"? There is also an emotion regulator in the book, and Rick's wife, Elan, dials the emotion regulator to number 670— the peace she deserves, and then she calls to order a pound of artificial flies for the electronic toad, and the story ends abruptly.

If we can forget pain and forget sadness through emotion regulators, then what is happiness for us?

The final question of happiness in the story is not so much a conversation between Brandeis and Donovan as a question to the player, are you happy? What do you think happiness is?

A dream of a rainy night

The Red String Club begins with Brandeis falling from the upper floor, which forms a perfect closed loop with the ending and is full of fatalistic hints. The whole story is full of the sense of fatalism and tragedy in ancient Greek dramas, and finally returns to nihilism, with the irresistible fateful beauty of the thread of fate woven by the goddess of fate and the goddess of fate.

At the end of the red string, we can choose to tell Donovan the truth, or just tell him I love you. It's hard for them to understand why nothing has changed, because you're still here and I'm here. Even if the world is destroyed, we are here, in the club where the rain is getting louder, in the piano, in the sad memory of human beings who have chosen.

I would like to end with a quote from Brandeis: I love you, I love you to death. ”