It
sickens me a little to read my own writing, but what can you do?
Below
is an edited to bare-bones section of my second post. The final
sentence really cracks me up now, so much so that I'm going to leave
it in.
---
And
we’re back. I’m Viper Manor and this is the second installment of
Lets Play Rhapsody (Red Edition). If you haven’t read the
introduction, it’s worth going back, just to get an idea of how the
game operates.
Double
clicking the black and grey icon in the game folder does two things.
Firstly, it automatically creates a shortcut to the game on the
desktop, and secondly it launches Rhapsody (Red Edition). I’m
still not entirely sure why it creates the shortcut this way, rather
than asking you during installation, but nobody has ever really
mentioned it online so I’m guessing it’s just a quirk.
WARNING:
From this point on there will be heavy spoilers.
The
first trick the game pulls on you occurs instantly. The screen goes
black and the logo for Heaven Echo Studios comes up in white, and
then fades away. And you wait. And wait. And wait. Then you press
Esc to try and move on and nothing happens. In fact, nothing will
happen until you move the mouse, at which point the darkness will
shift into slightly different shades and depths. The change is
subtle, but instantly noticeable, at which point you start doing it
more because that’s all there is to do. And after about twenty
seconds of this, there is a sudden blast of loud music.
Sound
in RRE is one of the strangest elements, and I will be talking about
it a lot throughout the thread. The sound files used are all strange
in some way or another. In this first instance, the music lasts
about six seconds and is just a simple tune hammered out on piano
keys, but it sounds incredibly distant. It’s loud, extremely loud
if your speakers are turned up to any real volume, but it sounds as
if it’s coming from far away, almost as if you’re approaching a
concert. I don’t know enough about musical terminology to describe
it technically, but it sounds like an individual is absolutely
pounding the keys.
I
THINK I’ve worked out the tune of the notes and they are as
follows.
Three
A# followed by a B
Three
G# followed by an A
Three
F# followed by a G
Three
E followed by an F
You’re
made to jump before you’re even past RRE’s loading screen. Or so
you think.
The
music loops for several seconds with a second of silence in between
each play, and will repeat six times before white writing appears in
the bottom right corner of the screen. All it says is “Right hand”
followed by a picture of a shift button. And then comes the second
trick. If you press the right-hand shift button (on conventional
keyboards sometimes referred to as the long shift) then the game
proceeds. If you press the left shift, the one most commonly used in
gaming, white text appears on the bottom left hand corner of the
screen declaring “That is your left hand”.
So
you press the right shift and suddenly there is light and movement
and an Abit brand cell phone is appearing on screen in a hand that
suggests we are in first person view. The music stops instantly as
your character lifts the phone up past the screen (as if lifting it
to their own ear), once more plunging the room back into darkness.
You
have been in control the entire time. Even before the Echo Heaven
Studios symbol fades in you are able to move the mouse and shift the
darkness. The game opens with you in POV your character, standing in
a pitch black room, completely alone and with no explanation how you
got there, and it doesn’t even TELL you that it’s done it.
This
may seem like a lot of words over mostly nothing, but I think it’s
a brilliant example of how the game works. Less than a minute of
play in and you’ve already been tricked into thinking the game is
still loading, that the game has crashed, that you’re yet to start
playing, and you’ve even been made to jump and introduced to the
unique control system all in one go.
Because,
the left shit is left hand, right shift is right hand controls are
the heart of the game. They are the very essence of what you are
doing in Rhapsody (Red Edition). Right shift makes you use your
phone; left shift makes you use your free hand. And in this there is
another brilliant bit of gaming, which I’ll explain after we take a
look at the title screen.
Once
you open the phone there is the sound of laboured breathing for a few
seconds, quieter and playing only from the right hand speaker. How
well distributed the sound is across the left and right speakers is a
testament to the skill of the sound engineers. The breathing turns
to static, the screen goes pitch black (which you only notice because
the darkness grows thicker), and after a few seconds of loading, the
title screen comes up.
The
title screen is really simple. Black with white words and a white
cursor (which is the only time you get a cursor). The options are
New Game, Continue, Options and Exit. Options leads to the typical
stuff, except for if you attempt to set controls. You can change the
speed and sensitivity of your mouse, but the key bindings cannot be
changed. Attempting to do so causes a single word to come up. ‘No’.
You
cannot change the controls. It is brilliant. Why? Because it means
you cannot do everything at once. The shift buttons are so far apart
that it takes two hands to use both simultaneously, which means
momentarily taking your hand off of the mouse, which means
momentarily losing your ability to look around. The fact it openly
dangles the option to change controls in front of your face, but
doesn’t let you, shows just the kind of clever design work that
makes Rhapsody (Red Edition) so unique.
Pressing
New Game turns the screen pitch black again and the game greets you
with your ringtone, this time just a single play through . The words
‘Chapter One’ fade up, then fade away.
You
are still in darkness. You can move through it using the WASD keys,
or crouch in it by pressing Ctrl. Despite all this, you are unable
to do much of anything without pressing the right shift button.
Light.
That is the single most important use of right hand in the game.
Right hand is your torch button. Right hand uses your cell phone –
answering it if it’s ringing, and causing you to thumb the centre
button if it isn’t. Thumbing the centre button makes the phone
light up for about eight-ten seconds, and illuminates part of
wherever you’re standing. Thus, in dark places, and a lot of the
game is almost entirely pitch black, you have to press the right
shift every eight-ten seconds if you want to see where you are going.
You
find yourself in a room, different from the one before the title
screen. You are holding your phone out in one hand, the nails are
painted in chipped purple nail varnish and you are wearing a black
coat or jacket of some kind. The right hand holding the phone
protrudes slightly into the screen in a manner that is instantly
recognisable as a FPS view point. At this point I overestimated my
own intelligence and tried to cycle through objects using the
mouse-button, followed by the number keys, but none of the buttons
did anything. At this point everything went dark again, so I pressed
right shift. More light. Left shift did nothing.
I
was already pretty scared. I can’t explain why, but something
about the way the game had already broken the rules, coupled with the
harsh and sudden sound (plus the picture of the meat cleaver
mentioned in the introduction) had me feeling extremely
uncomfortable. I remember that I actually went to the window and
closed the curtain because I had this urge to keep looking over my
shoulder and I was afraid that someone might be there. The game
effortlessly cultivates a sense of unease.
The
first room serves as a tutorial. The walls of the room are magnolia
and covered in thick black mould. The floor is wooden and when you
walk on it you can hear your footsteps and the creaking of wood. The
walking sounds are outstanding, primarily because they are subtle.
There are only three things of note within the room. Firstly, a
wooden door marked with shallow gouges that resemble cat-claw marks
at face height. If you use the left hand button on the door it
shakes against the frame and the words ‘locked’ appear in white.
Secondly, there is a dusty record player on an end table in the
corner. If you approach it and use left hand, the needle comes down
and the thing comes to life, but there is no music – just a
continuous series of fuzzy bumping sounds. Thirdly there is a short
cupboard in the wall which the left hand button opens to reveal a
long dark tunnel. You can only get into the tunnel by crouching,
which is something I only knew was possible due to having previously
looked at the controls screen. It’s another clever thing – if
you don’t know that you can crouch then you probably eventually
stumble upon the controls screen in an attempt to work out what to
do. Having seen the list of unchangeable key-bindings, it also
confirms that your options are pretty much limited to walking,
looking, crouching, and the two hands. Just as the opening moments
of the game establish the tone and atmosphere of the rest of the
game, the opening 'puzzle' introduces the player to every mechanic
they will be using.
The
tunnel is cramped and claustrophobic. Following the increasingly
damp and mouldy walls leads your character to a sudden dead-end at
which point your phone rings. Regardless of whether or not you are
using your phone as a torch at the time, when it is ringing, your
phone serves as a constant source of light. However, much like in
the pre-title screen sequence, actually answering your phone (which
is what happens if you press right hand whilst it is ringing) brings
it up to your ear and causes darkness to descend. The game shows you
this because most players will answer it the minute it starts ringing
(if only to halt the horrible music), without thinking to leave the
tunnel. And the second you answer it you are suddenly in total and
complete darkness. The music stops. A sobbing voice in the right
speaker burbles nonsense for a few moments, screams “One One One
One” with increasing ferocity, then the game crashes and drops you
to desktop.
I
both love and loathe Rhapsody (Red Edition).