Inverness Nights

[got_quiet]

Name: Inverness Nights
Status: Complete 
Site: https://kitsubasa.itch.io/inverness-nights
Rating: PG-13 (Descriptions of gore, executions. Graphically pretty benign)
Pairing: M/M
Description: Flawed immortals won't stop chatting.


 

I want to like this game more than I do. There's a solid concept here and I would probably recommend it to anyone who is interested an emotional VN that focuses on prose, but the later part of the game has some pacing issues, and I ended up getting bored and walking away before deciding to just beast through a near-full ending completion, mostly for the sake of a acceptably balanced review.

Inverness Nights runs on RenPy, so no worries about functionality. The art is alright. The character sprites are pretty good and emotive, the backgrounds are atmospheric, and there's some good "puppetry" and little transition tricks that are well done. The music is well selected too. There are a number of cutscenes to collect, and the art there is a little uneven but not bad.

The choice mechanics in the game are straightforward and typical VN. This is one of those games where you need to unlock the main paths by reaching a few preliminary endings, which is nothing new. My biggest gripe mechanically is that those extended paths don't introduce any new choices. They just offer much extended alternate endings, which I'll cover a further below.

Story wise there's a lot going on. Here's the setup: You're first introduced to Tristram, the main character. He's a grumpy immortal who thinks in convoluted metaphors. He's got a lover who's also quite grumpy. Their relationship seems to be antagonistic. In fact the first time you see the two together they're having a violent fight. It turns out that Alasdair was dying, but Tristram, who on top of being immortal has the power to heal, to a certain extent, stopped that from happening, leaving Alasdair with just a bad leg and looking a lot younger than he had been. Alasdair is not happy about this. He was a grumpy old man apparently ready to go grumpily to is death, and now he's both tired of life, disabled, young, and completely anonymous in the town where he's spent most of his life. In his fury over the situation and his anger at Tristram for doing something he doesn't understand to him, he threatens Tristram with reporting him to the law for buggery, a crime worthy of death at the moment.

Tristram takes this threat seriously and decides it's time to move the fuck on. He's planning his escape when a woman named Shell comes by and asks for him to sew a dress for her. It's very elaborate and will take some time, but she's got a lot of money to spend on it. Tristram decides to risk remaining for a week longer, knowing that if he flees with the money he'll be in a much better spot. 

The setting is very soundly set in Scotland in the mid 18th century, so even though the story is fantasy it's low fantasy. No one really explains anything about their particular skills or where all this magic is coming from. The characters are appealing. Tristram grew on me as someone who was extremely prickly and cynical but also vulnerable and emotionally constipated. Alasdair too may end up doing some really terrible things in the game, depending on the path, but he also is coming from a place of tragedy and pain. There's a question of who's really the asshole in the relationship, and some sense that the two of them are together mostly because they're two men that can't find anyone else. Deeply damaged people not making the right decisions are my favorite characters, so the two of them going at each other was very good for me.

Shell is not quite as interesting, but she's deliberately so. She spends most of the early game telling Tristram a story of the far past, one that coincidentally also includes a couple of immortals on a swashbuckling adventure that has all the trappings of a happy pirate heist until things get gruesome. Who she is remains secret for the majority of the first few runs of the game.

So that's the basic setup without spoilers. As far as the story goes there's appeal there. It's an interesting setting well executed and the characters are attractive in the way that only human messes can be. My only real problem with it was the style of writing and some of the pacing. I figured out pretty fast that the weird way Tristram has of thinking is just the writer's own habits, and it carries into what becomes a secondary POV character. Basically, the author is really into wordplay and puns. Metaphors abound. My personal pet peeve is writing that seems allergic to simply telling a reader upfront what is going on and insists on making vague allusions to the who what when and where, and the language here felt a lot like that. There are times when this really works, and the game hits on a nice turn of phrase, or a cheeky way of saying things, but just as often a sentence seems crafted just to deliver a pun, and clarity is sacrificed for the purpose.

The moments of failure happen because the writer is taking risks, and I can appreciate that, even though I felt frustrated at how sometimes the game refused to just flat out say what's happening without some roundabout metaphor. An example of a line I had to stop and figure out: "Swinging the bottle against the frame, water flushes free, a small knife in the deluge." In other words, dude broke a bottle and now he's got a shank out of the sharp glass glass. It makes sense but I have to first figure out how to arrange the phrases I'm given into a complete sentence. There were also some lines where I just had no idea what the game was talking about. Some of that early on is because it withholds as much information as it can from you before a few major plot reveals, but not all. After you've played a few routes, what seems like complete randomness starts to make a little more sense. It was sometimes hard to tell when you didn't know what a sentence meant because you hadn't been told a secret yet, or just because it was too ambiguously worded. I played the first few paths again after completing the game, and it seemed like things fell about 50/50 between the two.

Also, I don't consider myself particularly illiterate but I there were quite a few words I had never come across in my life here. This wasn't a case of thesaurus-itus either. I think the writer just uses terms like "hypocoristic" in everyday speech. I'd never criticize a game for having a larger vocabulary than me, but it is one more layer of challenge when it comes to reading.

Despite the language, which I think is mostly a matter of preference, I enjoyed the first portion of the game, mostly because the shorter length of the preliminary paths doesn't let the language get quite so overbearing. The first time I played I got a pretty gruesome end involving an execution. The second time I thought I had gotten a decent end, but Shell somewhat randomly decides she's no longer going to participate in the story and bids Tristram goodbye. If I were to stop at those two endings I'd think the game is a little weird and the endings were somewhat abrupt, but it wasn't terrible. But after playing through twice and getting the "good" and "bad" endings, the "true" endings are unlocked, and you're suddenly given a new secret option at the beginning of the game, which from now on means I need to spoil some things.

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Once you've unlocked the preliminary routes four more endings are opened up to you, and one of them splits again into slightly different variations. The big change is that you have the option to choose "The part of the hero to be performed by a shadow" in the beginning, at which point Shell becomes the primary protagonist after the initial part of the game is played. You end up learning that Shell has come to Iverness for two reasons. One is because she is recruiting Tris into a London group of immortals (it appears he never looked for anyone like himself prior to this). The other is to get him to repair a corpse for her, which is actually her real body. It was about midway through this new plot where I basically lost interest, because I never really cared enough about Shell or the parallel story she was telling, and once the focus turned to that the pacing issues got worse too.

The later paths also introduce a more clear antagonist in the form of a local guard. His story doesn't make much sense to me. He's got a deep resentment towards Shell for her helping his wife escape him a long time ago, and he's kind of a discount Javert in the sense that he's super into dispensing the law onto the locals, but he lacked depth. He was just an asshole that I didn't care about who made things complicated for the protagonists.

The first portion of the game has a decent number of choices, as Tristram decides how behave towards Alasdair and Shell, but the second part of the game is pretty much choiceless. The endings are locked in prior to the point of view switch, but the bulk of the plot happens after, so what feels like 2/3rds of the game is played without a single choice. The plot also changes from an interpersonal drama to a heist, where Shell has to break Tristram out of jail and needs to work against another immortal from her past. The two of them spend a lot of time talking. I stalled out here and went and did other things before struggling through to the end by speed reading it.

If you choose to play as Tristram you get a few new endings too, but while I enjoyed them a little more and they didn't drag as much, they were forgettable. As in, I literally can't remember what happened in them. Actually, I remember one where Alasdair tries to get Tristram arrested for buggery and then chickens out. Tristram's paths were pretty short, and felt a little like afterthoughts.

 

I think games like this, where there is a lot of emotion put into the work, and the characters are complex and their interactions are not so clearly driven by who you want the main character to end up with in the end, should be rewarded. But I just bounced off the prose too hard, and found myself to unmoved by Shell's dilemma.

So even though I ended up not really liking the game, I still recommend it. This is a VN that tries to go a little further, and I think it does manage to get there, mostly. It also looks at themes that usually are not dealt with well in games like this, namely issues of alienation, isolation, fear, and intra-community stress, which the devs have said was intentionally making reference to certain struggles that people in the LGBT community deal with. So as a commentary it says some interesting things, even if as a game it drags.