Say It In Red – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Video Games. For years, we have wondered: What are they? Where do they come from? And what do they want from us? Today, we have answers for you... answers that would delight even that strictest of industry philosophers: Sonic the Hedgehog. These are shorter games, far less hardware intensive than the latest AAA titles, and made by passionate developers. In fact, the only thing that might not satisfy Sonic's demands is that indie developers aren't always paid more to work less, but maybe by telling you about these Indie Visual Novels we played, we can encourage more people to send some money toward these incredible games.

This month, as is our semi-annual tradition, Sara and Runa each talk about a handful of indie visual novels they've played recently, each with its own incredible style, story, and impact. Some of these games are too short to warrant a full episode of the show, but honestly it's a struggle to keep ourselves from talking about each one for a full hour because they're just that good.

In these Indie Game Compilation Track episodes, which we do at least twice each year, we want to highlight some of the incredible indie VNs we've played recently and get people excited about the things happening in Indie Visual Novel development spaces. We want to not only showcase the amazing breadth of work coming from Indie developers but also talk about some of our favorite games, many of which touch on subjects, characters, and experiences we rarely get the chance to see in games from larger studios. You can find a list of each game we played below and we encourage you to play along with us, and go searching for other Indie visual novels as well! 

Most of these games are free and if not, fairly cheap (though please tip the creators if you are able), and you can read most of them inside of an hour or two. In fact, we want YOU, dear listener, to pick at least one of these games to play after you listen, and then tell us about it!

Games included in this episode:

• Stillwater by Studio Clump (00:04:30)
• May I take Your Order by Alexis Royce (00:10:27)
• Someone Stole MY LUNCH by Studio Clump (00:17:35)
• Mushroom Musume by Mortally Moonstruck Games (00:24:05)
• Penultima by Zetareishi (00:34:43)
• Doomsday Dreamgirl by Nadia Nova (00:46:35)
• Sink Your Teeth by SuperBiasedGary (00:54:36)
• He Fucked The Girl Out Of Me by Taylor McCue (01:01:10)
• Bad Faith by Mado (01:14:07)
• Dahlia by Crystal Game Works (01:23:06)

And we also mentioned...

• Rituals in the Dark by ebi-hime (01:30:20)
• Life after Magic by Chiraishi Games (01:29:21)

Dear Listeners,

Have you ever felt, particularly in late November when the rain picks up and keeps you housebound, that you are trapped in a strange house full of people you don't entirely know? In many ways, the distance between holiday revelry and horrifying mystery is smaller than we like to think. What would happen if all of our Thanksgiving reunions took place on an isolated, stormbound island? Would everyone in attendance keep a level head if a gramophone announced the most sordid sins of their past? If nothing else, you could take solace in knowing that it would be difficult for your own holiday gatherings to turn out as badly as those on Soldier Island in Agatha Christie's influential closed circle mystery, And Then There Were None.

And what better way to experience this book, the practical foundation and inspiration for so many mysteries and visual novels, than to force one unwitting Umineko fan to read it, stop before the final culprit reveal, and then deliver all of her thoughts and theories on the air for everyone to enjoy. That's exactly what happened in this episode - Sara, along with Umineko reading guests KT Kelly and Raven, found out that Runa had never read And Then There Were None (despite having read about a dozen other Christie novels even as early as middle school). So really, there was nothing else to do but to give Runa her assignment, listen to her theories, and then see how she reacts to the final culprit reveal live on the air.

You can even read all of Runa's Culprit Theories, including some truly wild things that didn't make it onto the episode!

As we mentioned here, you can also Submit a short audio clip telling us about an Indie VN you've played, and we'll be including as many of those clips as possible in our upcoming Indie VN compilation track episode coming out in December! 

This is a public release of a previous Patreon-exclusive episode! You can, and we hope that you will, support us on Patreon at patreon.com/sayitinred where for as little as $3 a month you can get access to over four years of bonus content, along with advance schedules to let you know what we're reading in the future! And as always, if you enjoy our show please tell your friends and give us a rating and review wherever you listen.

Good Morning Dear Readers, it's the wonderful day of February 29th, a day that only comes around once every four years! On this rare occasion we wanted to bring you an equally rare creation: Loopers, a kinetic novel developed by Key and written by Ryukisho07 of 07th Expansion! It's all about the wonderful day of August 1st, a day that only comes around once every four years! On this rare occasion we wanted to bring you an equally rare creation: Loopers, a kinetic novel developed by Key and written by Ryukisho07 of 07th Expansion! It's all about the wonderful day of August 1st, a day that only comes around once every 24 hours! On this rare occasion we wanted to bring you an equally rare creation:

This week, Sara and Runa enjoy the emotional ferris wheel ride of Loopers (2021), a Kinetic Novel devleoped by Key and written by Ryukishi07. The game centers around a group of teens and young adults who each fall into a phenomena known as The Spiral - a seemingly endless time loop fixed on the day of August 1st (year indeterminate). As a game that came out during the early stages of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it's no surprise that the characters' struggle to preserve their mental health and sense of reality might resonate with readers feeling as though they've lived the same day repeatedly during lockdowns. The Loopers group is led by Simon, a young man who is functionally now closer to middle-aged as he's repeated the day of August 1st for over 15 years, and his second-in-command Mia, a quiet and mysterious girl as well as the heroine of the story. They're joined by Kuro, Kai, Ritapon, Holly, and Leona before long. By the time our protagonist, Tyler, joins the spiral, however... Kuro and Kai have been killed repeatedly to force them into prolonged comas to prevent further self-harm, Leona placed herself in a coma to prevent her own psychotic break with reality, and the rest of the Loopers are in dire straits themselves. Tyler realizes that, since the greatest challenge of The Spiral is keeping yourself sane and grounded when all progress and growth is impossible, he needs to take drastic action. His solution, without hesitation, is geocache treasure hunting.

 As always, if you enjoy our show please consider rating us and leaving a review wherever you listen to podcasts! Our patreon (at patreon.com/sayitinred) also hosts a growing number of bonus episodes, released around the second week of each month. Our most recent episodes include a reflection on the a full overview of Touhou and its many girls, an exploration of Fantasy Romance webcomics and manwha tropes, and soon even a lengthy expedition into the House of Leaves.

Content Warnings for this episode:
Non-explicit references to self harm throughout this episode - we won't describe it, but please be aware that it comes up occasionally as a topic in the game.

You're on a narrow mountain path at the edge of dusk, on your way to a cabin that holds a captive princess. You might be confused or wary - Don't be. There's only one thing you have to do now: Continue down the narrow path, enter the cabin, pick up the knife, and listen to the voices on your podcast tell you what they think about killing the Princess locked in the basement. 

This week, Sara and Runa descend the ever-shifting stairs and discuss Slay The Princess (2023), a visual novel dripping with stylized narration, artwork, and atmosphere about the allegedly simple task of stabbing a captive princess in the basement of an isolated cabin. It's a game that you can finish in either about five minutes or ten hours and the winding array of routes and paths afforded to players make it hard to predict just what kind of experience you'll have when you start a new playthrough. Will you ignore the voice of The Narrator, discard the knife, and imprison yourself beside the princess? Will you kill her outright before she can dissuade you? Will you regret your initial choice, seek to make amends, or even prostrate yourself at her feet and beg for her almighty grace? Will you fall in love? Will you escape?

Slay The Princess has a lot of depth for a fairly short and contained experience with an excellent sense of design. Despite some shortcomings and missed opportunities, Slay the Princess manages to convey a richly varied experience from player to player. With a single playthrough to the credits taking only about two hours, it's easy to pick up, easy to fall into, and easy to revisit to find each and every version of the Princess to see what she'll say and how she'll react. Take care, however, of what you see in the mirror and what mirrors you see in the world.

As always, if you enjoy our show please consider rating us and leaving a review wherever you listen to podcasts! Our patreon (at patreon.com/sayitinred) also hosts a growing number of bonus episodes, released around the second week of each month. Our most recent episodes include a reflection on the 2008 Yuri Visual Novel Aoi Shiro, a full overview of Touhou and its many girls, and the harrowing arc of the Once Upon a Broken Heart novel series. 

Content Warnings for this episode:
Throughout the episode, discussions of stabbing, murder, and imprisonment occur as part of discussion of the game's story.

Dear Listeners, have you ever struggled to see something out of the corner of your eye? Has a local legend ever stuck in your mind, not for its content but for its puzzling omissions? Have you looked behind your screen at the figure flitting away from the light? Never fear - many listeners have reported to us that they suffer from a lack of normasight, so today we're giving you twice what you need to make up for that deficit: A full Paranormasight episode!

This month, Sara and Runa hunt through dark city streets and over the ghosts of ancient waterways while discussing Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo (2023). The game begins as many ghost stories do, with a pair of young adults wandering through the site of a local legend just before midnight. Ah, before that though, the game begins with a Storyteller helpfully introducing us to the concepts of Color Television and Telephone booths! An incredibly helpful moment, especially as the storyteller instructs us on how to use the options menu which, against your expectations, turns out to be an absolutely necessary step to continue the game's narrative. Back in this empty playground, a young working professional man, one Shogo, talks to his friend and perhaps budding crush Yoko about a strange ritual mentioned in a magazine recently - the Rite of Resurrection. Is there truly magic which could resurrect the dead? And if so, then why is Yoko so insistent upon searching through the sites of local ghost stories and discussing their origins? As it happens, these nine ghost stories (The Seven Mysteries subtitle is an intentional misnomer) hold the key to the forbidden spell to revive dead souls... and soon after midnight, Shogo becomes obsessed with obtaining this power, even if it means killing the others around the city in pursuit of it.

Paranormasight combines some of our favorite visual novel tropes with some excellent character writing and solid aesthetic style to deliver a very competent and effective horror thriller, ghost story, and puzzle box narrative. We avoid major spoilers beyond a certain point in our episode, in order to preserve some of this mystery and to encourage our listeners to play as well, so don't worry if you haven't played the game just yet!

At the time this episode comes out, we'll be just a couple days away from 2024!  Happy New Year, and thank you for supporting Say it in Red through these past twelve months. We've got a lot of exciting things in store for 2024, and you can find our schedule for upcoming releases up at patreon.com/sayitinred. As always, if you like the show please consider giving us a rating and writing a review on your podcast platform of choice, and thank you again for your support!

Content Warnings for this episode include:
Regular discussions of death by drowning, mentions of suicide, and some body horror.

Dear Listeners,
The days are darkening swiftly, at least for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere. Spring's Tide and Winter's Tidings wash over the world as the year draws to a close, and limited time sales all entice you to buy this year's biggest AAA games at a rare moment of discount. In this corridor of time that is so often filled with scarce moments of calm, why not take a moment to relax with a smaller game, perhaps even one that you may already own? Today, we're inviting you to check out the vast space of indie Visual Novels, and we'll even tell you about seven of them that we've played and enjoyed recently.

This episode is the second in our Indie Game Compilation Track series, in which Sara and Runa explore the depth and breadth of indie visual novels, covering games that might be too short for a full episode but still warrant our full attention and praise. 
We want to not only showcase the amazing breadth of work coming from Indie developers but also talk about some of our favorite games, many of which touch on subjects, characters, and experiences we rarely get the chance to see in games from larger studios. You can find a list of each game we played below and we encourage you to play along with us, and go searching for other Indie visual novels as well! 

In these Indie Game Compilation Track episodes, which we do at least twice each year, we want to highlight some of the incredible indie VNs we've played recently and get people excited about the things happening in Indie Visual Novel development spaces. You should check out all the games mentioned here, but more than that you should go look through itch, find and follow creators, and discover small indie games that you can love with all your heart. 

Most of these games are free and if not, fairly cheap (though please tip the creators if you are able), and you can read most of them inside of an hour or two. In fact, we want YOU, dear listener, to pick at least one of these games to play after you listen, and then tell us about it! 

Here's the full list of games we played, along with their timestamps and creators' store & social pages:

• Cannelé and Nomnom - Defective Agency: 00:04:10
  Game Page: https://pyrofoux.itch.io/defective-agency
  Creators: Yazaleea, Younès Rabii, LSKR, Arisae
  
  
• Retrace: 00:14:52
  Game Page:  https://spiderlilystudios.itch.io/retrace
  Creators: Spider Lily Studios
  
  
• Love & Dehumanization: 00:23:05
  Game Page: https://aria-of-flowers.itch.io/love-and-dehumanization
  Creator: Aria's Garden
  
  
• God is in the Radio: 00:33:27
  Game Page: https://catsket.itch.io/intheradio
  Creator: catsket
  
  
• Secret Little Haven: 00:38:40
  Game Page: https://ristar.itch.io/secret-little-haven
  Creator: Victoria Dominowski
  
  
• Stop Burying Me Alive, Beautiful!: 00:59:58
  Game Page: https://zephyo.itch.io/stop-burying-me-alive-beautiful
  Creators: angela he, robobarbie, destini islands, allie vera
  
  
• Com__et: 01:07:28
  Game Page: https://superbiasedgary.itch.io/com-et
  Creator: SuperBiasedGary

It's that time of year in the Northern Hemisphere, a time when chill autumn pushes us from the sidewalks into warm cafes for a thickly spiced latte and a hearty baked treat to ward us against the cold. Far to the South, spring arrives and the cackling trees and warming sun make a streetside coffee shop a delightful stop for an iced coffee and a delicate pastry as you pass the time. Is there anything so versatile, so timeless, and so persistent in our cities as coffee and the pleasantry of a soothing drink on a hard day? Yes, in fact.
It's Death.

In this Halloween special edition of Say it in Red, Sara and Runa are joined by returning guest and featured Melbourne Correspondent Bismuth who guides them, their Australian Psychopomp, through the laneways and backrooms of Necrobarista (2020). The game begins as a wayward and tired millennial, Kishan, wanders into a cafe and finds himself surrounded by a lively cast of people almost as odd as his present condition.  Kishan is dead, freshly so, and while coming to grips with his mortality and surroundings he also gets to know Maddy, the owner of The Terminal - a cafe that serves as the liminal space where spirits of the dead can linger for just 24 hours before passing on to whatever awaits them after the mortal world. Maddy is also a Necromancer and the cafe's current head barista, hence the title, and she spends much of her time wrangling drinks as Ashley, a teenager obsessed with robotics and caffeine and communism, fiddles with complex and paranormal machinery around the building. All the while Maddy's former boss and mentor, Chay, tries to keep everything in balance and everyone happy even as Kishan plummets into an existential crisis and paranormal debt collector, Ned Kelly (yes, the historical Ned Kelly) arrives to remind Maddy of what The Terminal owes. You see, people are only supposed to stay in the cafe for 24 hours before moving on, but Maddy and Chay aren't fond of kicking people out or keeping a stopwatch running for each and every customer. They've let far too many people stay far longer than a single day, and that Council of Death needs those hours back to preserve the balance. One way or another, the debt of time has to be paid even as those in the Terminal grapple with the weight of grief and loss seeping in around them.

In addition to this discussion of Necrobarista, Bismuth prepares an Australian Slang quiz for Runa and Sara - let's stick around to see just how many times our hosts are fooled by fake terms, misdirections, and how often they manage to mangle the meaning of this Melbourne terminology.

As always, if you enjoy our show please consider rating us and leaving a review wherever you listen to podcasts! Our patreon (at patreon.com/sayitinred) also hosts a growing number of bonus episodes, released around the second week of each month, so subscribe now to get access to even more Say it in Red to see you through the autumnal (or vernal) season.

Content Warnings for this episode:
In-depth discussions of death, mortality, and loss occur throughout this episode. 

Consider the city of our Future, the hyperconnectivity of high rise corporate data centers and the grungiest retrofitted back alley """studio""" apartments you can imagine. A city which, in many ways, resembles a shining new PC case fitted around a collage of older parts ranging from a smoke and dirt encrusted motherboard to the newest GPU that barely hums under the strain of eight hour video renders. Would you enjoy your life there, in a cyberpunk city where we carry on all the problems of the modern day and amplify them with new and exciting dangers and complexities? Would you be content, waking up in Love Shore each morning, even if you weren't fully human?

This month, Sara and Runa cover the recently released Love Shore (2023), a queer dating sim centered around two protagonists: Sam and Farah. We meet them both as they're finishing a prison sentence, but prison is a very different thing for them —  they're S.Humans, after all, and rather than being confined to a cell with a thin bunk and toilet they're instead frozen in an induced state of paralysis as their mechanical bodies are rendered inactive... and their minds left to wander for two agonizing years. When they return to Love Shore, their old lives and old flames are waiting for them. Farah immediately finds her best friend, Talia, then a friendly bartender Maya, and on her way out of the hospital crosses paths with Jo, a mysterious investigator and spyware salesperson. At the end of the night though, she's greeted by a voicemail from her old doctor, Imani, who urgently pleads with Farah to find her and help her as quickly as she can. Meanwhile, Sam wakes up to his friend and former driver, Vivian, rapping at his door. After she leaves him with coffee and a welcome back to the city, Sam instantly trips back into his ex, Aziz, and then later his former co-worker Conrad. At the end of the night though, Sam hears a commotion in the shop where he works and finds a mysterious and beautiful man, Alyosha, shot through the chest and bleeding on the floor. These relationships will pull Farah and Sam into different intrigues and plots coursing through the lifeblood of Love Shore, and possibly into conflict with one another. Whether they find romance, friendship, abandonment, or death, they'll do so in the shadow of the city's bright neon lights and, often, the gaze of literal Gods walking among them.

As always, if you enjoy our episodes please give us a rating and write a brief review wherever you listen to podcasts - we don't have an advertising budget so your reviews and recommendations are one of the main ways new people find out about our show! Also if you'd like to hear more content or find out how to support us, you can visit our patreon at patreon.com/sayitinred!   

Our memories are often strongly tied to a sense of Place, the confluence of sights and sounds and scents and pathways that take us to the heartwrenching, the familiar, or the uncanny. The setting of our youth, particularly our high school days, can often evoke profound nostalgia and pathos - The halls of our old school during the culture festival, the café where we worked back then, the abandoned warehouse by the harbor, the amazing view from Tokyo Tower, the heart-pounding moment of our first confession near Tokyo Tower, the terrorist attack we thwarted at Tokyo Tower... Can we not all relate to these universal constants?

This month, as with last month, Runa and Sara are joined by returning podcast guests KT Kelly and Mari to discuss Fatal Twelve (2018), a yuri death game and visual novel focusing on twelve people who have already died. In these final weeks of Fatal Twelve we see the cast dwindle until only Miharu and Rinka remain at the very end... along with some surprising new introductions. Through the Divine Selection process they reverse the death of a friend, confront their own uncertainties, and reach more than a few different potential endings. At the end of these twelve weeks, Rinka discovers the true nature of Divine Selection and, in some cases, that is the very last thing she ever learns.

This episode covers the remainder of Fatal Twelve, starting with Week 6 and continuing through all of the game's endings. Please keep in mind that this is the second of our Fatal Twelve episodes, so make sure you listen to our previous episode in order to keep up with the full story. Also, as our hosts discovered through the process of playing this game, Fatal Twelve is a rare instance in which we will make a platform recommendation: the Nintendo Switch release, at least at the present time, has additional scenes, CGs, and content not present in the PC/Steam release including several key emotional scenes involving Miharu and Rinka among others.

As always, if you enjoy our episodes please give us a rating and write a brief review wherever you listen to podcasts - we don't have an advertising budget so your reviews and recommendations are one of the main ways new people find out about our show! Also if you'd like to hear more content or find out how to support us, you can visit our patreon at patreon.com/sayitinred!   

Content Warnings for this episode:

General Content discussion of Suicide & Self-Harm throughout
General discussion of Terrorism & Terrorist Bombings throughout

The best proportion of coffee grounds to hot water for a single pour-over cup is roughly 1:16 by weight, or roughly two tablespoons to twelve ounces by volume. Scales are recommended for precision and large batches, but for a single cup I usually find that I'm fine just estimating and pouring the water slowly over the medium-coarse ground coffee so that it blooms and froths nicely. After that, it's just a matter of waiting a few quiet moments as the coffee drips down into the mug. It's a great time for contemplation in the morning, think back to that warm summer day a few weeks ago when you died in a horrific accident and then entered into a surreal weekly elimination tournament for the stake of your ongoing existence.

This month, and next as well, Runa and Sara are joined by returning podcast guests KT Kelly and Mari to discuss Fatal Twelve (2018), a yuri death game and visual novel focusing on twelve people who have already died. We follow Rinka, a second-year high school student at a prestigious all-girls school who hops on the train one morning only to immediately burn to death in a violent explosion. She awakens soon after as if it were a dream, but disjointed memories and the sudden appearance of mysterious books full of ornate cards aren't often kind auspices. The next week, at midnight on Sunday, she drifts back to sleep and enters a surreal space full of suspended gears and twelve podiums each arranged at the twelve numerals across the face of a massive clock. A small girl greets her and explains that she has most assuredly died, and now she's engaged in the process of Divine Selection - a contest to determine which of the twelve unfortunate souls here will get to live on, and which of those must return to the moment of their death and forgo the possibility of a future. This would all be a bit easier to navigate, perhaps, if Rinka's dear friend Miharu, a gorgeous girl who clearly has a tremendous and devastating crush on Rinka, wasn't also standing right beside her as a fellow contestant in this Death Game.

In this episode we covered the first five weeks of Fatal Twelve's story, seeing characters meet, clash, get eliminated, become racist caricatures, grow, completely miss the obvious signs that lesbianism is all around them, and learn more about the strange process of Divine Selection in which they're all entangled. As she continues learning about other contestants and trying to make headway in the game, Rinka starts to question the merit of her own life and whether she truly deserves to live if it means stealing the possibility of a future from the other contestants. Even more unsettling, there seems to be more behind this game than simply a benevolent goddess's whim to give one person another chance... Is life the dream from which death awakens us, or have we been made to dream of death to hasten its arrival?

As always, if you enjoy our episodes please give us a rating and write a brief review wherever you listen to podcasts - we don't have an advertising budget so your reviews and recommendations are one of the main ways new people find out about our show! Also if you'd like to hear more content or find out how to support us, you can visit our patreon at patreon.com/sayitinred!