Phantoms

The following is an edited version of the last post I uploaded on RRE before The Bad Weather Incident. Everything from this point on will be new, or pieced together from scraps of stuff I still have written down from back then.

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At the end of the last session we had just received a couple of rather ominous phone calls, culminating in an unpleasant scratching at the door. 

The antagonist figures in RRE are always compared to the faceless monsters of the Amnesia franchise, and it is easy to see why.  To explain it better than I ever could, I’ll quote from one of the few mainstream sources in which reference to RRE can be found - a popular review of Amnesia: The Dark Descent.  Editing note: I see that I was one of those idiots I mentioned in my last post.

“[The enemies in Amnesia] are perpetually half-seen and obscured monsters, far more unsettling and frightening than anything seen in the Resident Evil or Silent Hill games.  They would not be topped in pants-shi**ing scariness for a few years, and only then by tiny soviet indie game, Rhapsody (Red Edition).  Both rely on the unknowable nature of the enemies to cloud their motivations.  Yes, the creatures in Amnesia will be called aliens by players, just as the dark, wispy apparitions in Rhapsody will be called ghosts, but they are foreign and weird and terrifying because you don’t know what they want from you.  You cannot bribe, you cannot threaten, you cannot beg.”

At the end of the review, the author returns to the comparison, and his opinions mirror my own almost exactly.  He does, however, fail to mention a relevant feature of the monsters of RRE, which leads me to believe he may never have actually played the game. 

“[Amnesia: The Dark Descent] utilises all the concepts of ‘gaming’ perfectly.  It is not a movie, a television show, or book – mediums which rely on showing you what they want you to see.  Instead, it’s a video game, and part of what makes that media so engaging is the ability to control your own fate.  How then, to stop your players from staring at the cracks in the set?  How do you ramp up the tension, when a player is free to do as they please?  How do you stop the player from staring at Godzilla until they can tell it is just a man in a costume?  In Amnesia, the sanity system that was so celebrated at the time of its release encourages you to avoid more than occasional glimpses of the monsters roaming the castle.  It’s clever, but ultimately heavy handed and it has aged poorly.  Returning to Rhapsody (Red Edition) for a moment, you can see that there are other ways of stopping your players from looking at the monsters head on.  Rather than drape them with in-game repercussions, simply make them so horrifying – so absolutely unpleasant, that the player chooses to interact with them as little as possible.”

There are a number of fan nicknames attributed to the antagonists of RRE, both as a collective, and as individuals.  With no word from the studio, the fan nicknames have become the canon within the player community.  The monikers to stick include ‘breathers’, (due to the breath on the outside of the window, and the heavy moaning sounds they make), ‘shakers’ (and the less intimidating ‘vibrators’ due to their violently blurred edges giving the appearance that they are in constant motion), and Rhapsodies (after a poster on the Gamefaqs forums claimed that they are proven to be the source of RRE’s title at a later point in the game).  I will be using the term that sprang to my mind the moment I fist saw one - ‘phantoms’, but also referring to each by their individual names where they exist.

So then, what are the phantoms?  Like so much about the game, nobody really knows.  I mentioned on IRC that I think I am currently about four or five updates from the end of Chapter One, and approximately seven updates from reaching a point further than anyone else has ever reached. Editing note: It was actually about two updates away from where anyone else ever reached.  There are three phantoms present in Chapter One (two of which are unavoidable encounters), named Neighbour, Ceiling Trap, and Chimera by fans.

Whilst all three vary in size and shape, there are certain things which tie them all together.  All of them emit wet, laboured breathing sounds with wails and moans of various pitch.  All of them are clad mostly in thick clouds of darkness, through which occasional body parts emerge.  All of them are blurred and fuzzy to look at, as if being viewed through cloudy water.  And all of them seem to really hate you.

The reason that I doubt that the Amnesia reviewer has every played RRE, is due to the fact that there is a very similar gimmick to the sanity system employed within the game.  To be caught by a phantom is death.  To be chased by a phantom is death.  But to even look at a phantom is death too.  With no health system in the game, the player character exists in only two states.  She can be alive or she can be dead.  Life is the game as we have explored so far, buggy as it may be.  Death is darkness, followed by a return to a recent checkpoint (or, nearly as commonly, a crash to desktop).  And in between those two stages is a gulf of swirling darkness.  Because each time you interact with a phantom, the world grows darker.  Each time you catch sight of one, the shadows grow longer and the corners seem deeper and the noises grow louder and you feel smaller.  You feel more helpless and the walls are swallowed in darkness, and soon the dark clouds surrounding the phantom have joined with darkness clouding your own vision and you know they are close, but not how close, and the urge to press right hand and flash your cell phone light, just for a second, becomes increasingly hard to ignore.  But that’s the last thing you want to do.  Because then the phantoms know exactly where you are.