I don't know if there is a better game on this site. I don't know if there is a better interactive visual novel out there. I don't know if there is even an adult game that can accomplish what Our Red String has ambitiously done so far; constructing a world where frequent ravishingly crafted characters who actually assert their existence. More than being objects for our sexual gratification, each of them has a life, problems, shortcomings, that intersect one another in a seemingly mysterious way. And in those characters, like our MCs Ian and Lena, is a libidinal drive that pushes them to strive, to seek, to find.
To do a critical reading of this game is by no means to underappreciate its erotic madness. Especially in the way EvaKiss reveals them in their alluring nakedness. In this aspect alone Our Red String has already put itself at a radically different level than most of the games on this site. With all due respect to other creators who give all their hearts into creating and giving us joy. 3dcg games with built-in models often don't have as much designing freedom and can't bring to life the vibrancy, the intimacy like, for example, the way Eva juxtaposes the ideal male and female bodies, reaching into the depth of our instinct to love, to adore, to infatuate.
Therefore, to be critical of the game is to take it as a serious work of art that sets out to make timeless statements about the human conditions.
Structurally Our Red String is a conservative game. As the lives of Ian, an aspiring writer and Lena, nude model and waitress, fade from frame to frame, we quickly realize that Ian's fate, if he is to be rewarded sexually, is to become a strong confident man who knows just the right things to say, like Lena whose eventual path of participating in sex work is reflective of the way she has to play into and commodify her femininity. To use the terms from Eva's previous work, they can become "bad" to the extreme but only toward the direction that their gender roles allow. In that way Eva has constructed a binary where the "bad" archetypes of the fuckboy and the sexually liberated girl are on one hand, and the romantic ideal of a couple striving for "good" monogamous love on the other.
Why is this binary constructed? Does it have anything to do with the predominant sexual fantasies of us who consume this game? Could that be the reason why there is a curiously lack of gay intimacy whereas lesbian love is not only present, but critically shapes most of the female characters we've seen? Like Ian, who stumbles upon a surreal scenery and is made to confront his free will, we too find the paths of our sexuality pre-written. I think it's important to think about the forces at play that have had an overarching influence over the realm of our sexual imaginary even before we are conscious of desire. If not for anything, for creators to make better games that not only subvert stereotypes, but to even critique the commodified matrix of desire itself.
