Cynewulf in a Bind: A Review · 5:58am Apr 19th, 2018
The Beast is tied to a chair in a dark room. There are cameras and a variety of out of place odds and ends everywhere, and behind her what appears to be the beginnings of someone's admittedly fancy study. It looks like a villain's lair under construction. We see that she this is all in the depths of an abandoned oil rig somewhere in the Atlantic. Her sneering brother, the Prince, insists she recount her adventures while posing as him, and she grudgingly accepts. She doesn't have much a choice, does she?
She's so done with his bullshit. She's been through hell, and this smarmy asshole won't stop being... well, being himself. She's done it all because he promised her something that only he could provide, and as far as she can tell that was bullshit. Nothing gained, and just about everything lost.
"So?" he asks.
"Everything?" She sneers at him. "The boring shit, the drinks, the politics... Even the sexy bits?"
He rolls his eyes at her. "I want to know everything that you did. Everything. It's important."
"I mean, if you really need to know the exact details of my encou--"
He groans. "You're a creature of appetites. It's pathetic. I don't care. Tell me everything. I'll give you a head's up if you should skip ahead. Just... tell the story. You posed as me for 6 days. I want to know how you did."
So... she tells him.
In occasionally very graphic detail.
So I played Ladykiller in a Bind and I have thoughts about it. Thoughts AND opinions.
Firstly, sorry but I gotta: this blog will be talking ‘bout raunchy stuff, so if that bothers you, please don’t read it. Likewise, I’m gonna have some frankly uncomfortable discussion about nasty traumatic-adjacent shit in here (not mine). Seriously. This is not some challenge or something. I warn you cause I care about you.
Firstly, I should give you some background. Ladykiller in a Bind is on steam and while I will explain in a moment why I can’t blank-check recommend it, its not that much. It’s by Love Conquers All Games, which is basically just Christine Love if I understand it.
Christine Love is one of my all time favorite indie game creators. This pink-haired lady wanted to be a novelist, but it was visual novels that got her a place in the sun, and you can tell in how well she writes them. I tend to measure how good a character is by how easy it is to have a strong opinion on them. Plenty of characters sort of make me shrug, or will elicit temporary feelings based soley on situation. But Love’s characters don’t have to be doing anything grand at all for me to feel strongly about them, and even when off-screen for half the game I still have definite opinions.
Love’s first game is Digital: A Love Story, which I cannot recommend highly enough. It’s not that long, its free, and its wonderful. It is also probably the game least like all the others. Why? Because all of the others have some uniting themes that I can sum up in a single word. Hold on to your hats, y’all. I’m about to drop a cursed phrase.
Christine Love’s games are about players making choices that matter.
That isn’t to say they always change the outcome of the story. But they don’t have to. How often do your choices change the outcome of your life? No, seriously. Did what you have for lunch today change your life? Well, no, in a big-picture way, it did nothing. But it certainly effected your day, didn’t it? Further: your partner is down and needs some attention, but you’re also down and you could use the same. You choose… well, what do you choose? Imagined into a binary (it’s not) of Aid or Retreat, that choice may not fundamentally alter your life. But it will move you. C.S. Lewis’ whole thing about living beside immortals isn’t a thing you have to be a Christian to get. It’s honestly one of the most insightful things he ever said. Our choices don’t have to alter the shape of the world to Matter. And, because the only meaningful way we engage with the world is through our subjective experience… well. Maybe it does change the world, then.
What Ladykiller, both of the Analogue games, and don’t take it personal all have in common, I think, is that they rely on series of unpleasant and uncomfortable choices. These choices may or may not have any real effect on the story (and often don’t change the end) but they do still change things--they give us information we would not have had before, or they reveal to us secrets that we would rather not have known.
Her games have a way of worming into my mind and heart and sort of just shredding them in a way that not many other games do. I played through Digital in one sitting and then laid on my friends bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about life for a couple of hours. I was still devestated the next day. Don’t Take It Personal left me feeling… dirty. Loathsome, wrong, what have you. Analogue made me grieve and rage. Ladykiller… Ladykiller did all of that. They did this because they gave me choices. They gave me uncomfortable choices and dangled in front of me my greatest weakness: “well, you want to know, don’t you? You want to see everything… don’t you?”
We talk about point of view in fiction, and how a good writer can create the headspace of a character so well that we can ride along inside it and inhabit it. Love does this for us time and time again, leaving a lot of room for us to make ourselves comfortable… so that she can ultimately make us deeply uncomfortable.
Ladykiller is a game about lies and secrets. Your character, the Beast, is a loose cannon butch biker lesbian who just wants to be free of her insanely rich father and her messed up family. Unfortunately, you bombed your senior year and your father has threatened to take your bike. Desperate, the Beast makes a deal with her identical twin brother, who we’ll call the Prince.
The deal is this: he’ll go to summer school for her, pass as her, and ace it. In return, she’ll go on the weeklong cruise/senior trip that he doesn’t want to go on. She will become him, dressing in clothes he has chosen and with the warning that the Prince has many enemies and that if they suspect they can get to him through her, they will definitely do so. She must lay low. She has to have caution.
There’s one problem. Well two problems.
The Prince is a machiavellian asshole and the Beast is an insatiable horny Cassanova on a boat full of attractive and imminently smoochable women.
Two people onboard know your secret. The Princess/The Beauty and The Maid, who works on the ship. They also know your brother’s plans, which he did not fill you in on. The Beauty will help you ease suspicion… if you agree to be her plaything for the night. Yes, as in it’s a sex thing. If you feel the heat on your back, you can show up at her door that night and for an hour or so of being her sub she’ll ease everything over and reset your suspicion meter. Full disclosure: holy shit y'all the scenes with her are UNREAL they are so fucking good i would kill to be as good as her okay im done
This is the first of our uncomfortable choices. Are we okay with basically selling ourselves and our bodies for a day of safety, especially when there are easier ways? Well, the Beast is actually kinda okay with it, depending on your choices. I mean, the Beauty is a beauty, and she enjoys what she goes through. But are we the players okay with making that choice? You can skip the ero-scenes if you want if you have a sexual bone in your body, don't but they still happened canonically when you decide to go to her at night.
There are more. It’s easy to forget, but the game is quick to remind you that the Beast is NOT her brother. The shy Stalker who helps set up the Game onboard the ship, for instance, is very much accepting of your charms… because she thinks that you are her brother. And you can enjoy carnal things with her… because you are smooth enough to not reveal you are her brother. Fucked up, ain’t it? I haven’t followed down that route entirely. You can steal kisses from half a dozen people based on the lie that you are your brother, and go much farther than stolen kisses and a license to flirt. You can do this solely off of the fact that you are, at every moment of this game, lying. You can also, to be fair, avoid these things. But the more you fight against your Brother's example, the more danger the Beast will be in. Not choosing the mean or dismissive choices can sometimes work out okay, but you'll always be agonizing over them.
More: The Beast is an ass who can’t help but make people squirm for her enjoyment. The prudish but honestly very human Lieutenant can be tormented with lewd comments (tho in my playthroughs I was nice to her and teased her both, and in the end it actually became genuine banter and that route made me smile).
Oh, back up. The Game. I mentioned it. I forgot to explain it.
Yeah, this isn’t just a dating sim about how genuinely messed up dating sims kinda are! It’s also a political game. An announcement is made on board the ship announcing a mysterious game wherein the one with the most votes from their classmates will be rewarded 5 million dollars at cruise’s end. Sweet, right? Well, yeah, honestly. But people don’t like your Brother. Acquiring those votes means participating in the machinations of others, helping them lie or manipulate their classmates, and probably a lot of flirtation.
Winning the game is also kinda fucked up along the way. The choices that win you the most votes will leave a somewhat sour taste in your mouth usually. The ones that are harmless will raise people’s suspicions and put you in danger. You don’t have to get votes. But its in the game and its on your screen and by virtue of playing you will find yourself trying to collect them all the same. The Class President's plan to win and then split it along democratic lines is noble, but he's also a prick that you instantly hate who has a disturbing obsession with "claiming" the Beauty that sets one's teeth on edge. You have the option at one point to give him all of your votes (I had 28 at that point), and its actually not the worst choice... but its also going to help a slimy chauvinist prick who you hate, and rewarding the antagonisms of lowlifes who treat others like dirt or stepping stones to their own aggrandizement is not exactly something I'm big on doing, myself. It's uncomfortable.
Do you be nice, or do you play the asshole and stay safe? How long can you pretend to be your brother and do what he would do before you have to be decent for once? And can you even afford to be a decent human being on a ship full of people very willing to throw you in the cargohold as blackmail?
Ladykiller is the fulfilment of the shades of uncomfortable choice in Love’s other games. There’s a somewhat infamous choice that has no bearing on the game’s plot in Don’t Take It Personally where your character, the teacher of a class who has the ability given by the school to 100% monitor every single thing their students do online stumbles upon a password protected lewdpic that one senior sends another. Her hint as to the password, intended for her girlfriend, is in fact a piece of information you were given. It is very possible for you to enter that password.
There’s a completionist pull to do so.
And then of course you shake your head and go wait what the fuck, man? What the fuck? Why is this a choice? (For the record, I think giving you the choice and then the consequences of opening that picture happening in text would have been a better way of doing this.) The choice is there because it is a real kind of choice. Not world shattering but decidedly uncomfortable. Do you want to know? People’s secrets are easy to tear into. Discovery is like a drug. But can you afford that high? Can you afford to be the kind of person who violates the sanctity of other’s selves?
The Analogue games don’t stress this as much, but their entire gameplay involves you reading the intimate life details of doomed passengers. Is that okay? Is it okay for you to leeringly spy into the sacredness of other’s private sorrows and intimate encounters? Your job in that game is as salvage and data recovery. Is it really neccessary for your report on the Mugungwha’s fate for you to read the entirety of the tragic story of a doomed queer woman’s relationship with a married woman? No. But you probably will anyway. You’ll read every line of it.
And of course... In Ladykiller, there is a hell of a lot of middling anime nudity and some FAR better than middling writing going on, and you kiiinda wanna see it. But is it worth prying into things that aren't yours to pry into? Is it worth violating trust and acting at least temporarily in fucked up, predatory ways in order to do so? The Beast and the Prince alike comment on many of the choices you make as you play--she's telling this story to him, to remind you--and they often essentially shame you for your choices even as the game rewards you.
I could talk about Love’s themes of how humans and technology interact, about privacy in a changing world, about being queer and the experience of being fundamentally outside of things. And maybe I will one day, but ultimately it’s the uncomfortable choices that she sets up for players to encounter along the way that help make these things shine through. It is easier to drive a point home if you do it through gut-wrenching and real, personal horror--at yourself, of all things--then it will ever be to write a treatise. Or a blog, even.
Sounds like you enjoyed the game.
Wow what a game.
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oh did i mention this game is about destroying capitalism with vague revolutionary plots with lots of bondage and impact play cause like it's 60% kink and 40% anticapitalism
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I mean, leftists and kink generally go hand-in-hand
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Perhaps in the modern America, but that's far from being generally true, historically.
It's amazing the lengths people will go to for a sense of autonomy.
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as a hilarious historical aside, the CPUSA straight up used to have as their position that homosexuality was rooted primarily in bourgouis decadance and misogyny
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Y I K E S
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People will willingly wrap chains around their necks if they think it will make them free.
I really want to play this game now JUST to see if there's anything in it about how this game that's so utterly dependent on choice, only exists as a result of a choice decided in backstory that just about any teenager would make.
That kind of thing is the best part about the latest Far Cry games. You can change the prologue (spoilers: they lead to a very fast "bad" end, but you CAN make that choice).
It's funny, I had no intention of playing Ladykiller in a Bind, I liked Analogue okay, but I mostly played it because I'm absolutely fascinated by transhumanism (and the soundtrack is really really really good if you like chiptunes and scifi flavored atomosphere).
Think this post has changed my mind.
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Don't forget Cuban and Soviet anti-homosexuality laws!