Episodes
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Please remember this combination. When you enter the elevator (FIRST FLOOR! Don't enter from the ground level or garage!) press the play button on this podcast. You should do this alone, ideally late at night or in the early morning when no one else will try to ride the elevator with you. Make sure the building you're in has at least 10 floors. Once you arrive on the fourth floor, wait 10 minutes while you listen to the podcast and then press the button for floor 2. Repeat this for each step: 10 minutes of podcast, elevator button, wait for the doors to open and close, and then listen in the solitary, sealed room of the elevator for another 10 minutes. By the end of this, you will have heard our entire podcast, giving you a full overview of why you absolutely should not play the elevator game (unless you are a catgirl searching for your cat girlfriend).
For the height of the spooky season, Runa and Sara are discussing The Elevator Game with Catgirls(2022), in which catgirls Asahi and Kirin decide to play the fabled Elevator Game of urban legends lore. According to this game, if you enter an elevator, alone, and press the floor buttons in a particular sequence, you can travel to a strange and eerie Otherworld. You'll know when you reach that place because it will be entirely empty and devoid of life, and in the deep red sky you'll see a glowing cross. To return, you simply have to find the elevator you arrived in and complete the elevator game again... provided the elevator comes when you call it. After waiting outside in the snow for her girlfriend, Kirin, Asahi gets nervous and decides to rush in and try to find her. She quickly discovers that she, too, is now trapped within the Otherworld of the elevator game as well, which she wouldn't believe so readily had she not also had the paranormal experience of growing kitty ears and a tail months earlier. Through the process of solving puzzles scattered through the building's lobby and within the Otherworld, Asahi finds scattered notes that seem to reveal the inner thoughts and memories of the other people trapped there... including some from Kirin.
As always, if you like our show and want to support us, please give us a rating and review on wherever you listen! You can also support us directly on Patreon at patreon.com/sayitinred. We don't advertise, so listener recommendations and word of mouth are the best way for new listeners to find us! -
How do I get to the convenience store from here? How does anyone get to a convenience store from anywhere? Where are you right now, and can I follow you for a while? I don't think I'm catching up even though I told you I was right behind you - I just didn't want you to worry or feel inconvenienced by my indecision. Hey, is it alright if we just sit here for a while? I think... yeah, even this much has worn me down this morning. Let me tell you about a game I played recently. A couple games, in fact.
This month, Sara and Runa discuss the Milk series of games, covering both Milk Inside a Bag of Milk (2020) and Milk outside a bag of Milk (2021) and the surreal horror of mundane daily struggles with mental health, common chores, and our attempts to form connections. The first game focuses on you, the player, entering your name just before an unnamed girl entreats you to help her go to the store and buy a bag of milk. You have dialogue options, sometimes ranging from soft comfort to abject cruelty and often landing in sarcastic needling territory. As you accompany this girl, she reveals some small details about her daily struggles with life, chores, and the way she sees the world. "I'll try being a visual novel protagonist!" she says, and thus her thoughts appear as narration for us to read, even if she can't necessarily give them coherent voice. Once you've successfully helped her buy a bag of milk, she returns home to see her mother, represented as a blank, hollow-eyed mask, who tells her to go directly to bed. The second game picks up right here, immediately upon the girl's return to home as we now see her mother as a massive, formless being with sprawling arms and tendrils who injects a thin, needle-like finger into our protagonist's arm. From there, we help our protagonist, now trying out her life as an Adventure Game protagonist, search for her stray thoughts which have turned into fireflies. She longs for sleep and dreaming, and at the end of the night your choices will determine the vision she sees when she closes her eyes.
This is, above all else, a game about plumbing the depths of your own mind, the ways we navigate society and life as we struggle with mental illness, the way we make sense of our pain and treatment, and the dreams we see when we can finally sleep.
As always, if you like our show and want to support us, please give us a rating and review on wherever you listen! You can also support us directly on Patreon at patreon.com/sayitinred. We don't advertise, so listener recommendations and word of mouth are the best way for new listeners to find us!
Content Warnings for this episode:
Our episode contains mentions and discussions of suicide, self-harm, online harassment, and forced injection. -
Missing episodes?
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August is not merely a month — it is an emotion. For some, the final month of Summer rings in its hottest days and the looming dread of a new school term. For others, it's a time steeped in nostalgia and the memories of summers' past. Perhaps your August is the feeling of bittersweet romance and the distant promise of your future. Perhaps, even, as the seasons turn you feel, more strongly than anything, a longing for 1992.
This month, Sara and Runa discuss Dōkyūsei: Bangin' Summer, a 2022 remake of a game from thirty years prior and one of the very first dating sims to gain widespread popularity and acclaim. Playing as Takurou, an extremely horny high school senior in the final weeks of his last summer break, you find yourself wandering the city to find girls, talk to girls, flirt with girls, take girls on dates, and answer quiz questions about their outfits in exchange for cash prizes. There are no fewer than 14 girls for Takurou to pursue, five of whom are his classmates as the game's title suggests while the other nine are adult women Takurou meets around town. Even in this early entry to the genre, you can see dozens of themes, mechanics, tropes, innovations, and gags that are still common thirty years later. In fact, if you ever feel that you may have a new, fresh, and never-before-seen idea to inject into a dating sim... play Dōkyūsei first. There's a high chance that one of the original entries into the genre has already beat you to the punch.
As a heads up for listeners, Dōkyūsei: Bangin' Summer is an adult game and some routes feature explicit depictions of sexual assault and violence. We've included timestamps below for the sections where we discuss these events.
You can also play the game without the 18+ patch which excises a lot of this content, though we found that playing without the 18+ patch skips large sections of certain scenes, even those which are not H scenes along with some potential graphical bugs that are solved by applying the 18+ patch.
Content Warnings for this episode
Teacher/Student route discussion - 1:36:45 to 1:45:15
Discussion of Sexual Assault - 1:46:30 to 2:06:20 -
"The small coastal town where you'll be staying this weekend bears the cool sea air like a mantle. Your suite, the luxurious Victorian era Revival room in a traditional Western style hotel, overlooks the harbor and the steep, switchback mountain trails that flow into town like a ruddy stream. Breakfast is served an hour past dawn and free ornithology classes are held each afternoon with the proprietress. When you leave here, you will forget some things. Don't be afraid - this is what we wanted for you. It's not the end of something. It's the start of your next journey.
Everything has a Reason.
9.5/10 stars
minus 0.5 stars because the manager got drunk and proposed marriage to me?"
- Customer review of a certain mountaintop hotel.
This month, Runa and Sara join returning guest Raven to discuss SeaBed (2016), a richly woven tapestry of memory, grief, kindness, and healing. The story begins as the lively and spontaneous Takako enjoys a seaside vacation with her long-time girlfriend, serious and grounded Sachiko. Or perhaps it begins in elementary school, when Takako and Sachiko first meet. Or... did it start when Takako disappeared? Was that four years ago? Two years ago? SeaBed quickly immerses you in the world of these two women, joined quickly by Narasaki, a childhood friend of Sachiko's who studies disorders and conditions of the brain and memory. As Sachiko struggles to recall exactly what happened, Narasaki guides her through the landscape of her past with Takako and into the strange pathways of Sachiko's own perception and memory. Soon, Sachiko recalls that Takako didn't just go missing - she died. That's when the story shifts, and we begin to see things from Takako's perspective where she's recovering from a memory condition in a seaside sanatorium.
For listeners who haven't played SeaBed, we avoid talking about major spoilers up until 00:56:00 minutes, so if you want to listen that far and see what you think, we encourage you to listen along up to that point and then check out SeaBed for yourself!
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 some deep dives into The Executioner and Her Way of Life light novel series and you can find today's guest, Raven, on bonus episodes for Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, a Umineko volume 1 restrospective, and an in-depth explainer about Riverdale. -
Dear Listeners,
Blood & Play: 00:01:49Co-Pilot: 00:11:01 Gender-Wrecked: 00:30:49Airtime Media: 00:16:37Bloom into Frost: 00:39:53Saint Spell's Love Guide to the Magical Student's Spellbook: 00:51:5031st March, Midnight: 1:08:44
Like the inevitable woe of an ancient curse, Summer is upon us once more. We're awash in refreshing recipes for strawberry rhubarb shrub, homemade swamp coolers, and the perfect accompaniment for a day indoors during a rainstorm: Indie Visual Novels. With huge bundles such as the annual Queer Games Bundle on itch, you're bound to find something that speaks to the most particular desires of your heart. Today, we're once again inviting you to explore the delightful space of Indie Visual Novels, and we've even brought some of our dear Patrons along to help us tell you about no fewer than Thirteen Indie VNs today!
This episode is the third 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 around, 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, and games our Patrons told us about, along with more information on where you can find them:
Runa and Sara played...Patron Submissions
Cel by Date: 00:08:27 (Sent in by Ioyful Knight)Reckless Sympathy: 00:14:05 (Sent in by Emrys)My Father's Long Long Legs: 00:23:54 (Sent in by Meowgon)Love and Dehumanization: 00:35:06 (Sent in by Case Deerly)Needy Streamer Overload: 00:46:45 (Sent in by KT Kelly)Misericorde, volume 1: 1:00:20 (Sent in by SuperBiasedGary) -
If you should ever find yourself trapped in a time looping phenomenon, there are a few tried and true strategies you can employ to survive, maintain your grasp on reality, and single out the mastermind(s???) behind the loop. First: Stock up! The mastermind of this loop will not expect you to be well hydrated, full of electrolytes, and properly equipped for mountaineering. Second: Get to know your surroundings! You've got plenty of time to study up on the most minute details of local history and you never know what obscure newspaper clipping might give you a huge advantage. Finally: Just die. Die. Die until you find the key to your escape. It's that easy!
This month, Sara and Runa finish Raging Loop as they pick up with the third main route and read all the way through to the end (and a bit further)! Haruaki Fusaishi has learned about the people of Yasumizu, he's found himself entangled in romances with two of its citizens, he's died and survived as both an outsider and a participant of the feast of the Yomi-Purge, and now... he'll take on the role of a Wolf. Despite struggling to find a scenario in which everyone could survive the first night of the werewolf game, Haruaki immediately finds himself designated as a murderer who must lie, kill, manipulate, and betray the people he's come to know so well. Despite his experience with the game and his looping abilities, he finds himself cornered and quickly at his wit's end. The wolf's side, it seems, is not as powerful and privileged as it might first seem. Beyond even that, what awaits him at the end of the wolves' victory is something more terrible than he ever considered, and more catastrophic than anyone expected.
If you're playing along, for this first part we read all the way up to the acquisition of Key 16. This episode covers all the events up to that point, roughly the first two main Routes of the game with their brief tributaries, and our next episode coming out in May will cover the remainder of the game.
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 expedition into the House of Leaves, and most recently: A brief history of Pretty Cure.
Content Warnings for this Episode:
Discussions of Genocide, Sexual Assault (including sexual assault of minors), and Native American Burial Ground tropes. -
You are traveling alone on a dark highway late at night. Desperate for a place to rest your weary frame, and maybe a distraction from the terrible break-up that set you on this journey, you turn down a narrow mountain road. The pavement abruptly vanishes beneath you and a rock flies up pat your face - that's right, you're on a motorcycle. Really a bad position, if we're being honest. You search for a house light, a streetlamp, any sign of civilization at all, and then at last you see it:
The buffest deer you could ever imagine, keeping pace and locking eyes with you on this increasingly narrow trail. You can't help but feel that this deer somehow pities you as it scoffs and, finally ceasing its torment, bounds away into the treeline at your left. Of course, you couldn't have followed the deer up that steep hill even if you tried. This makes you feel a bit better about crashing down the ravine a moment later, though the menacing deer still stands out in your mind. Ah, if only I could loop through time, you think... then I could make that deer respect me. You are, unfortunately, now lying beside the mangled heap of your motorcycle at the bottom of a river. You are the protagonist of Raging Loop, and you are about to die (again).
This month, Sara and Runa start stripping apart Raging Loop (2015) and cozy up with the inhabitants of an eerie mountain village. In the venerable folk horror traditions of many stories of city travelers stumbling into rural areas with strange religious practices, and the venerable VN tradition of time looping until you figure out how to survive such a place, Raging Loop quickly pulls readers in with a pretty compelling premise. What if you were playing a game of Werewolf, for real, and also this game of Werewolf was the result of Divine Mandate? Our protagonist, Haruaki Fusaishi, appears at first as the exact Median of all Anime Guys but really quickly shows us that he's kind of a freak with a loose moral compass. He realizes quickly that he can loop through time, starting just before he arrives at the rural village of Yasumizu, and decides to use this knowledge to push people's buttons and figure out how they work. Meanwhile, people's corpses explode in grotesque heaps, some seem to get possessed, and each night the wolves kill someone else. Each day, then, the villagers gather together and decide who they think is a wolf and hang them. Despite his new ability to re-try events with the knowledge gained from his death, Haruaki has only found deeper mysteries and a great deal of pain. What, then, will help him escape this raging loop that keeps raising loups?
If you're playing along, for this first part we read all the way up to the acquisition of Key 16. This episode covers all the events up to that point, roughly the first two main Routes of the game with their brief tributaries, and our next episode coming out in May will cover the remainder of the game.
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 expedition into the House of Leaves, and most recently: A brief history of Pretty Cure.
Editor's notes: Sara mentions that Raging Loop came out in 2017, which was the English release date while 2015 was the original release date. We also re-recorded a couple sections that had audio issues and we apologize if any of those are too noticeable! -
Readers, Friends, Members of the Scientific Community! You, astute as you are, may recall a moment in the distant past in which Sara and Runa adamantly proclaimed that they would never cover Steins;Gate on the podcast - This memory which some of you may hold is LIVING PROOF of the phenomena which we will henceforth discuss in today's episode. You see, that was an alternate, parallel timeline in which we did not discuss Steins;Gate! Thanks to miracles no smaller than the manipulation of the flow of time itself, and also Sara's carefully curated Steins;Gate Abridged playlist, we have arrived at the present day, present timeline.
This month, Sara and Runa discuss the ins and outs, befores and afters, and the even the erstwhiles of the timeline hopping narrative of Steins;Gate (2009). As part of the Science Adventure series it shares some references to a previous Say it in Red subject: Chaos;Head Noah. In both games you can see characters grounded in the culture and various subcultures of specific regions of Tokyo (Shibuya for Chaos;Head and Akihabara in Steins;Gate) along with characters who engage with internet subcultures and message boards like 4Chan. Where Chaos;Head focused on the protagonist's dysfunction and delusions having an impact on reality itself, Steins;Gate focuses on a small group of university students who inadvertently create not one but two different forms of time travel. The first allows them to send text messages to people in the past, altering the conditions of reality in the present. The second allows them to send their own consciousness back through time to a previous date. Both of these methods rely on a microwave connected to a cell phone receiver.
As the club dabbles (and then fully plunges) into time travel and time alteration, our Protagonist Rintaro Okabe realizes that his dear childhood friend Mayuri seems doomed, perhaps even destined, to die no matter how they try to change the course of history. Throughout all of this, the genius girl who Rintaro is definitely not fond of and intimidated by, Kurisu Makise, is improving their time travel devices and discussing the theories, implications, and repercussions of their meddling with Time. In between all of this, they also find time to flirt while revealing themselves to each be nerds who spend a lot of time arguing about conspiracy theories on 4chan. In the end, however, Rintaro Okabe faces a profound dilemma, one that will force him to undo all of his work and truly consider the potential, and futility, of time travel.
For this episode, we followed a Steins;Gate Abridged playlist which Sara constructed - this playlist cuts out portions of the game, including sections which include significant and prolonged transphobia. We don't discuss that material in detail, but we do reference it as part of our discussions.
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 most recently: a lengthy expedition into the House of Leaves.
CORRECTIONS:
Runa sometimes does not notice when she mispeaks before an episode goes out. During this episode, when she meant to reference the creators of the Science Adventure series, or the specific writing for Science Adventure games, she sometimes attributed things to Nitroplus instead. To clarify, while Nitroplus was involved with these games, it's more accurate to attribute these things to the core creative staff specific to each game rather than Nitroplus as a whole.
Content Warnings for this episode:
00:51:30 to 53:00 - Discussion of a character route th -
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,
Cannelé and Nomnom - Defective Agency: 00:04:10
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:
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! -
Shhh... keep still. Listen closely. Between the gasps of the snowstorm and the crowding underbrush, there's something lurking. Look, just up ahead - those two shadows are moving deeper into the forest. What could they be doing there, so far from the village and so long after dusk? Where could they be going, so lightly dressed in the midst of a blizzard? And most of all, do you think... maybe, they might be... girlfriends?
This week, Sara and Runa visit the snowy mountainside village of Eysenfeld in Studio Élan's Heart of the Woods, a yuri visual novel featuring supernatural romance, mystery, and some dramatic gay action. Our story unfolds as an internet broadcasting duo, Tara and Madison, make their way to a remote village in search of persuasive paranormal proof. Just before they departed, however, Madison declared that she would be leaving the show after this trip, taking her best friend and long time collaborator Tara by surprise. Before they can discuss the winding tension between them, they arrive at Eysenfeld's only train station and meet their host, Morgan - far more subdued and deadpan than either of them expected for one of Tara's ardent fans. Eysenfeld as a whole is far from what they anticipated, between the prickly reception they received from mayor Evelyn, Morgan's mother, and the dubious glances they get from all the townsfolk. Morgan is resolute, though, and offers to show them the sort of definitive proof of paranormal activity that Tara has searched for all her life. And she does.
And now, this investigation has gone from a sleepy retreat to a fight for survival... one that Madison is about to lose.
Heart of the Woods (2019) is a delightful queer visual novel featuring not one but two romances and a cast of quickly endearing characters. While there are some loose threads and pacing issues at times, this game is the perfect thing to get you thinking about significantly cooler weather, queer community, and ghost romance this pride month.
You can find more information about Heart of the Woods, along with Studio Élan's other work, on their website at vnstudioelan.com!
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! -
Dear Listeners,
Amelie: 00:03:10
Have you ever found yourself at the end of a tiresome day with scarcely an hour for personal leisure? Have you ever sought, to seemingly no avail, a story that can slake the particular cravings of your heart? Most importantly, do you like Visual Novels? We certainly hope, since this episode finds us talking about nearly a dozen.
It's time for our inaugural Indie Game Compilation Track episode, in which Sara, Runa, and returning guest KT Kelly discuss 11 different Indie Visual Novels (alongside a couple of RPGmaker horror entries). 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! Our goal with these compilation track episodes, which we're hoping to do at least twice each year from hereon out, is to not only highlight some of the incredible indie VNs we've played recently but also to get people excited about the things happening in Indie Visual Novel development spaces and encourage you to 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 at sayitinredpod on twitter!
Here's the full list of games we played, alongside their timestamps and creator social pages:
Game Page: https://twoandahalfstudios.itch.io/amelie
Creator(s): Two and a Half Studios | https://twitter.com/twohalfstudiosA Year of Springs: 00:06:40
Game Page: https://npckc.itch.io/a-year-of-springs
Creator(s): npckc | https://twitter.com/npckcHanna, We're Going to School: 00:21:12
Game Page: https://kastelpls.itch.io/hanna-school
Creator(s): Kastel | https://twitter.com/kastelwritesApparition: 00:28:40
Game Page: https://cartyrs.itch.io/apparition
Creator(s): Carter | https://twitter.com/cartyrsCute Bite 00:31:40
Game Page: https://hanakogames.itch.io/cute-bite
Creator(s): Hanako Games | https://twitter.com/hanakogamesRe: Kinder - 00:40:10
VGPerson Translation: https://vgperson.com/games/
Creator(s): ParunDon't Toy with Me: 00:55:00
Game Page: https://karmic-punishment.itch.io/dont-toy-with-me
Creator(s): Karma | https://twitter.com/karmicpun_devMilk inside off a bag of Milk: 00:57:40
Game Page: https://nikita-kryukov.itch.io/pmkm
Creator(s): Nikita Kryukov | https://twitter.com/nkt_krkvUs Lovely Corpses: 01:08:20
Game Page: https://dmarielicea.itch.io/uslovelycorpses
Creator(s): D. Marie Licea | https://twitter.com/dmarieliceaMissed Messages: 01:18:45
Game Page: https://zephyo.itch.io/missed-message
Creator(s): Angela He | https://twitter.com/zephybite77 Oleander: 01:27:00
Note: Runa was absent for this discussion, from the emotion of [Frozen in a Spotlight]
Game Page: https://runa-liore.itch.io/77-oleander
Creator(s): RunaPlease check the content warnings for each game before playing.
Dead Girl's Notebook, by Aria
Other games Mentioned during this episode:
https://aria-of-flowers.itch.io/dead-girls-notebookLong Live the Queen, by Hanako Games
https://www.hanakogames.com/llq.shtml
-
Paris. A city full of historic architecture, beautiful filming locations, priceless art, and at least one group of high-class chaotic queer thieves. Dear Listener, if you were desperate, would you join them in the Parisian underworld? Would you risk your life each and every day to pull off bigger and bolder heists? And how many hours would you spend petting Elizabeth the Cat?
This week, Sara and Runa are joined by their friend Rawles who guides them both through the life and unfortunate death of the mobile dating sim app, Lovestruck. Having closed down in 2022, Lovestruck is no longer available to play in its original form but fortunately fans have archived and preserved all of its dozens upon dozens of romance routes. The breadth of Lovestruck is far broader than we could ever hope to cover in a single episode, and the individual stories within the app are often longer than the games we've covered on this show. Today our focus is primarily on Queen of Thieves, a delightful queer dating sim starring a fresh art school graduate who gets swept up in the high-stakes world of heists, forgeries, intrigue, and flirtation with the notorious thieving group, the Gilded Poppy. With two women and four men available for the female protagonist to date, and each route spanning several hours and containing dozens of gorgeous CG scenes, it's easy for just about anyone to find a route they might love in Queen of Thieves. To read it now in 2023, however, you have to watch a video playthrough - with the app itself closed down, there's no way currently to play any of the Lovestruck dating sims in their original form.
As we discuss Lovestruck, we also take a more detailed look at games preservation, the fate of games and creative work controlled by corporate profit motives, and the possibilities for future game preservation, marketing, and dating sim development. This episode represents something bittersweet and in more than one flavor... Lovestruck may be gone, but all of its stories and the wonderful writing and queer character relationships still exist in archival form. Even so, it's hard to feel entirely satisfied and content after seeing such rich potential and knowing how rare and fragile such opportunities are for queer dating sim developers in the current games market.
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!
All of our reading this week was made possible by the LS Salvation Squad! Check them out on tumblr and youtube for a full archive of the Lovestruck App's stories! -
Dear listeners, do you remember your high school years? Do you ever think back on those days, in the 9th inning of Summer as school was just waiting for you at home plate? Were you ever caught up in the rush of young love and the discovery of your sexuality, wondering if you dared try to steal second base? Have you ever wondered what would happen if you asked a podcaster who knows less than nothing about baseball to write not one, but two separate opening gags for a baseball-themed episode?
This week, Sara and Runa tackle (which i don' t think is a thing you do in baseball) the absolutely delightful Butterfly Soup 2 (2022), a sequel to the Butterfly Soup visual novel we covered in our 25th episode. We return to Oakland, California, primarily in 2008 and 2009, to follow our four young queer teens as they struggle through high school, navigate their difficult family lives, process the overwhelming world around them, and get up to a lot of baseball and baseball-adjacent shenanigans. Once again, we follow Diya, Min, Akarsha, and Noelle through their days as they play Mario Golf, film group project skits, play elaborate games of gay chicken, discover useful tips and tricks to confront their internal biases and think about gender, and think about the cataclysmic gulf between their lives and the lives of their parents and families. We left these kids last time after Diya and Min had reunited after many years apart, finally confronted their feelings for one another, started dating, and got all four of the main characters banned for life from the ice cream and snow cone shop near campus. In this direct sequel, we begin by following Akarsha's rapid descent into distraught gay turmoil as she realizes she's falling hard for Noelle, who might even be straight for all she knows! What's more, Akarsha adamantly refuses to put herself at risk and expose any vulnerability, which makes her plans to seduce Noelle... a bit obtuse. Meanwhile, Diya and Min are dating happily and spending every day together in gay joy, apart from the moments when Diya tries, and fails, to connect with her own mother in even simple ways and struggles to even conceive of a day when she might come out to her. Min, on the other hand, still struggles with the abuse of her father, fears that she might fall into similar patterns of outrage and anger, and the difficulty of confronting intracommunity racism and bigotry. Noelle takes a trip to Taiwan for her grandmother's funeral and, while there, confronts the distance between herself, her parents, the rest of her family, and a culture she struggles to grasp even when she's reaching for it with both arms. Then, to make matters worse, it seems that Akarsha has saddled her with some...unnecessary feelings. How will any of this go, and most importantly: Will they win their no stakes baseball game against another high school club!?
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 warnings for homophobia, parental and familial trauma, and some very rough stuff surrounding relationships with ones parents.
00:34:20 to 00:35:30 - Discussion of racism and racist harassment - Show more
