That the game begins not with a vision of confinement, visual limits, but with a vision of your prisoner standing against the pale blue of a clear sky is not just an encouraging glimpse of the freedom which eventually awaits you. It's a statement that freedom simply can't exist without structure: one builds one's prison in the process of escaping it, filling more and more of the screen with it until, at the moment of departure, Alcatraz is finally made whole. It's as much a loving tribute to the maze which defined both tabletop and digital games in its time as it is a prescient refutation of the open-world structure which would replace it, a triumph of Apollonian design already pregnant with melancholy as it looks to the long Dionysian night to follow.
In order to better understand the themes of A Fuga Impossível, I think I'd like to take a brief digression to talk about the 2024 Bezos-disfavored visual novel Malcatras' Maiden, which uses these ideas of freedom and structure in a more historicized way, with a greater consciousness of their status as kitsch objects.
The historian Stephanie Larson's argued that Sappho's Fragment 94 is structured to draw parallels between the narrator's feelings for her departing lover and those of Penelope in the Odyssey, to present this affair not as the emphemeral pre-marital love her audience would have understood this kind of relationship to constitute, but as something mythic. This is a reasonable guess; she does something comparable in Fragment 16 by direct analogy to Helen and Paris, but I'm not certain that it matters very much. The content of Sappho's work doesn't seem to have interested the Greeks nearly as much as her composition, and it's difficult to blame them: Fragment 94, when it's rendered faithfully into English by Anne Carson, is a really dull poem. As I see it, the mythologization of intrafeminine sex begins with the Victorians, and that Sappho's role in that mythology has less to do with her own work than the poetry of Swinburne and the illustrations of Simeon Solomon. When we consider that Solomon and Swinburne had both contributed to The Dark Blue, a literary magazine whose only lasting contribution to history is having published Carmilla, it becomes a lot easier to accept that Carmilla is, more than the first vampire novel, probably the first major lesbian novel.
Malcatras' Maiden signals that it's influenced by Carmilla by naming one of its characters for the pseudonym Carmilla adopts during her seduction of the General's ward. The reference seemed tacky at first, especially given the game's frontloading of its most generic and self-indulgent qualities, but it's ultimately earned. Nova appreciates and is able to effectively appropriate the best aspects of that novella: the heady Gothic overstatement of desire and restraint, and the presentation of love as something which makes communication impossible. At its best, when it lets these qualities take over, it's a really worthy piece of exploitation, approached with a kind of genuine investment that makes the prose and the blood-and-nightgown aesthetics feel more fresh and vital than they have any right to.
The game's doesn't really have anything to say about the family, and certainly can't approach incest as a serious theme, but it's able to integrate it into its own internal mythic structure. The game's at its best when it confines itself to that mythology, which is why I was so disappointed by shift into prosaic language and extended JoJo's fights in the last act. The final few minutes of the penultimate chapter are satisfyingly camp, as is the brief epilogue, but the ending's kind of unsatisfying. A story about a character failing to grow might be satisfying in a game that relies less on maximalism and more psychological realism, but this one demanded that the friction between her programmatic and the animal qualities should come to something.
As ever, having a transgender character's prevailing quality be helplessness kind of rankles, but the genre in which it's working does something to warrant it. At the very least, it's worth it for what I interpreted to be a very good joke about Fuseli's The Nightmare. Fantastic soundtrack and animation for a work on this scale.
In order to better understand the themes of A Fuga Impossível, I think I'd like to take a brief digression to talk about the 2024 Bezos-disfavored visual novel Malcatras' Maiden, which uses these ideas of freedom and structure in a more historicized way, with a greater consciousness of their status as kitsch objects.
The historian Stephanie Larson's argued that Sappho's Fragment 94 is structured to draw parallels between the narrator's feelings for her departing lover and those of Penelope in the Odyssey, to present this affair not as the emphemeral pre-marital love her audience would have understood this kind of relationship to constitute, but as something mythic. This is a reasonable guess; she does something comparable in Fragment 16 by direct analogy to Helen and Paris, but I'm not certain that it matters very much. The content of Sappho's work doesn't seem to have interested the Greeks nearly as much as her composition, and it's difficult to blame them: Fragment 94, when it's rendered faithfully into English by Anne Carson, is a really dull poem. As I see it, the mythologization of intrafeminine sex begins with the Victorians, and that Sappho's role in that mythology has less to do with her own work than the poetry of Swinburne and the illustrations of Simeon Solomon. When we consider that Solomon and Swinburne had both contributed to The Dark Blue, a literary magazine whose only lasting contribution to history is having published Carmilla, it becomes a lot easier to accept that Carmilla is, more than the first vampire novel, probably the first major lesbian novel.
Malcatras' Maiden signals that it's influenced by Carmilla by naming one of its characters for the pseudonym Carmilla adopts during her seduction of the General's ward. The reference seemed tacky at first, especially given the game's frontloading of its most generic and self-indulgent qualities, but it's ultimately earned. Nova appreciates and is able to effectively appropriate the best aspects of that novella: the heady Gothic overstatement of desire and restraint, and the presentation of love as something which makes communication impossible. At its best, when it lets these qualities take over, it's a really worthy piece of exploitation, approached with a kind of genuine investment that makes the prose and the blood-and-nightgown aesthetics feel more fresh and vital than they have any right to.
The game's doesn't really have anything to say about the family, and certainly can't approach incest as a serious theme, but it's able to integrate it into its own internal mythic structure. The game's at its best when it confines itself to that mythology, which is why I was so disappointed by shift into prosaic language and extended JoJo's fights in the last act. The final few minutes of the penultimate chapter are satisfyingly camp, as is the brief epilogue, but the ending's kind of unsatisfying. A story about a character failing to grow might be satisfying in a game that relies less on maximalism and more psychological realism, but this one demanded that the friction between her programmatic and the animal qualities should come to something.
As ever, having a transgender character's prevailing quality be helplessness kind of rankles, but the genre in which it's working does something to warrant it. At the very least, it's worth it for what I interpreted to be a very good joke about Fuseli's The Nightmare. Fantastic soundtrack and animation for a work on this scale.