The Opening Sequence and 'The Tutorial'

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.

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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).