Ceiling Trap I

With the revelation that the classroom has been destroyed, and with nowhere else to go, the only choice is to head past the previously screaming wall and out into the corridor. The corridor is long enough that your light will not reach the end of it, and wide enough that you have to stand in the very very centre in order to see both walls at once.

As you head down the corridor you are hit by a series of three increasingly violent shock waves. Each is a low-pitched rumble that resembles grinding stone and thunder. They are accompanied by sheets of dust falling from the ceiling and the corridor shaking beneath your feet. As you reach the point which triggers the third shock wave, if you look up you can see that the ceiling ahead retreats into a domed alcove, at the very top of which hangs a busted chandelier. Partway through the third shock wave, the chandelier comes crashing down and is an instant death. The trap is timed so that if you run continuously, it WILL hit you. The only way to avoid it is to stop and wait for it to fall, at which point it will take considerably longer to do so. It's a dumb trick, but it gets most player's twice. The first time it kills you, the second time you wait and when it does not fall, presume its a one off, only to be killed by it again.

The chandelier death is nasty. The screen is ripped from your control and the player character looks up, utters the briefest burst of a panicked gasp, then tries to shield her face as the mass of black iron and glass falls towards you.

If you trigger the rumbling in the classroom before heading out to the corridor, the chandelier crashes down before you can even see it. In the event that you do trigger this, looking up into the domed alcove reveals a tiny flurry of movement behind a long crack in the ceiling with a short wet breathing sound. It's not much of a hint towards the following puzzle, but it's something.

At the end of the corridor is an open door leading to another spiral with stairs leading up and down. There are occasional cracks in the wall through which you can see black ivy growing up outside. After a few seconds in the stairwell the door slams shut behind you, and the area is filled with wet, sickly wheezing. This is the second phantom, nicknamed Ceiling Trap.

Ceiling Trap is difficult to visualise because you only see so much of it at a time. Like all phantoms it is cloaked in black smoke, but it appears to be considerably larger than Neighbour as its body fills the entire width and height of the stairwell. It has four points that occasionally peaks out from the smoke and thick legs that it uses to drag itself forward. Each time these legs extend and grab the wall they make a slurping noise, suggesting they are perhaps like the tentacles of an octopus.  The four points flail around and are reminiscent of the eyes of a snail.

You cannot look at Ceiling Trap for long, even less time than Neighbour. As the blackness spreads towards you, Ceiling Trap is effectively propelled closer and closer. This section of the game is a flat out chase down the stairs with the sucking and wheezing phantom quickly gaining on you. This puzzle is the first to really take advantage of the unconventional key bindings, and its a difficulty barrier that lots of players fail to pass. If you attempt to climb the stairs up, you are quickly enveloped in darkness and die. If you run down the stairs, obstacles block your path and must be Left Handed. The first few are blackboards which the character happily shoves aside. They slow you down, but not by much. Ceiling Trap for its part, simply crashes through them, swallowing them into the darkness and destroying them with a series of crunches.

Then you round the curve to find your path blocked completely by a mass of broken furniture. You hammer Left Hand and the character shoves the mass as hard as she can, then glances back towards Ceiling Trap who is inevitably rounding the corner close behind. And then your phone rings...

Spires and The Mural

The constant crashing to desktop is a real problem, especially on older machines. It creates this strange situation where the game requires a relatively high-functioning PC in order to run, despite the fact that it is graphically unimpressive. The visuals are interesting, but they are nowhere near as crisp or detailed as anything you would expect from a game that requires so much tech in order to run smoothly.

With Neighbour defeated, we move on to the next stage of the game. Opening up RRE and clicking to continue places us in a new area with no visible connection to the tunnel we were just in. There is a heavy breathing in the background, but there is no sign of Neighbour and it slowly fades away as you explore. Just like the previous area, the room is dark and it is impossible to find your way without your cellphone torch.

The area appears to be a classroom or conference room. There are dusty blackboards on the wall, covered in chalk diagrams. These diagrams show similar variations of the same thing – multiple large things being drawn to, or revolving around, a central smaller thing. There is a pile of recording equipment in the corner. You can Left Hand several parts of the pile and cause things like LEDs to come on, tape decks to open and close, and empty decks to play. There is one deck containing a tape, and if you line up the angle just right (which is hard to do without any cursor on screen) you can play it. It contains a conversation between three people, but there are other voices talking inaudibly in the background the entire time.

“Male Voice 1: (inaudible) she do for it?

Female Voice: Nothing. She didn't (inaudible).

Male Voice 2: (inaudible – rising pitch suggests a question).

Male Voice 1: She's very good.”

Whilst playing the tape is not necessary in order to move on, once it ends there is a sort of earthquake rumble sound effect which causes dust to fall from the ceiling. This is, of course, only visible if you are using your cellphone torch at the time. There are a few tables and chairs, but you can't interact with them. The only other points of interest are a door a window.

Looking out of the window reveals that we are at the top of a very tall building at night. There is speculation among fans of RRE that this building is one of the spires seen from the window of the very first room. Below us is a courtyard, across from which there are a few other towers. The moon sitting in the sky is an ugly and irregular smear of ivory. There is a near trick where if you stand far enough to the left, you can sort of peak around the corner of the window and see the outside of where we are headed next – another tower covered in dark ivy.

Heading through the door reveals two paths, the nearest is a spiral staircase leading down, the second is a long corridor which your cell light is too dim to penetrate.

The staircase down eventually becomes a dead end, but the game plays with your expectations a bit. From top to bottom, you have to run down for about a minute to reach what you're looking for. All this time there is no indicator that you are making progress other than the hallway moving past. Each rung of the spiral is identical to the one above and entirely featureless. Even more misleading, any player who is put off by the lack of progress and attempts to go up at any point, quickly reaches the top again as if they have only been moving on the spot the whole time. However, if you do continue to go down the stairs, you eventually get a phone call. As always, when you answer it everything goes dark. The voice on the phone is a low gurgling moan and speaks each word incredibly slowly.

“The truth is not always beautiful.”

There is a jump scare when the call ends – the mural.

The moment you illuminate the area, you find yourself staring inches from a brick wall blocking your descent. However you angle yourself in the staircase, once the light comes up you are facing down the spiral. There is a mural painted on the wall which mirrors the diagrams found in the classroom, only this time the large things are jagged black shapes with angry white faces, and the small thing in the centre is a misshapen stick figure. The sudden image is unsettling, but the continuous screaming which accompanies it is worse. The puzzle is very simple, but the screaming is loud and realistic enough to cause some distraction.

You cannot look away from the mural and if you attempt to retreat backwards whilst still looking at it, you hit an invisible wall. You have to wait for your light to go out (stop pressing Right Hand), and then retreat back up the stairs in darkness. If you switch on the light whilst turned around, you find the wall immediately behind you and the screaming increases in volume to the point of distortion on most speakers. You never see the wall move, but it is always behind you when you look. It is possible to die in this section if you continue to stare at the wall for long enough. You hear breathing behind you and then everything goes to black. The solution is simply to keep running up the stairs. Once you reach the top, the wall slams into place and blocks the staircase and the mural fades away.

Strangely, returning to the classroom reveals that the blackboards have been broken and tossed around the room.   

Neighbour

The first phantom is scratching at the door and the first of many phantom puzzles is about to begin.

If you Left Hand the door then it opens and you find yourself staring into total darkness. The moans and cracks and static noise flare to a really unpleasant volume. The darkness spreads quickly across the screen and after a few seconds, you crash to desktop. There are rumours that if you look away quickly enough then you can survive opening the door, but nobody has provided reliable evidence of this.

The only other doorway in the room is now locked, so you are left with little to interact with. The longer you leave the scratching at the door, the louder it gets. The wheezing and moaning grow louder too, and the louder they get the more distorted they become. Strangely, using the taps resets the noises to their initial level which leads me to believe that the taps affect on sound is just a bug.

The solution to this first part of the puzzle is hard, because it involves you doing something that seems counter-productive. You need to let your phone go dark. This is a common theme in RRE – when you think you've tried everything, stop – and try doing nothing. Once the room has been dark for about 10 seconds, the scratching will stop and the wheezing will recede. You can no longer open the door, even if you can find your way to it in the darkness. The only way to proceed is to Right Hand and turn on your cell. The room is immediately filled with wheezing and screaming and if you look out of the breath-covered window, there will be Neighbour.

Describing the appearance of the phantoms is always going to be hard. You can't see much of them to start with, and the moment you glance at them, things just get darker. Judging from the height of the window, Neighbour is about human-sized and taller than it is wide. Like all phantoms it is various shades of black, purple and dark blue, and is engulfed in some kind of smoke cloud. A single throbbing limb writhes from the darkness on occasion. The moniker of Neighbour comes from one of many early RRE fanarts in which this protrusion was imagined as a waving hand and a speech bubble declared “hey Neighbour I just wanted to invite you round for a bbq but I can see your busy :D”.

With distance and the window between you, you do have a chance to look at the phantom for a moment, but any longer and the darkness spreads across the screen. Neighbour grows to fill the window, and then its darkness engulfs the walls. Each time you Right Hand, the light draws it towards you, and each time you look at it, you are closer to death. You are forced to negotiate your way through the room in darkness, trying to avoid Neighbour without looking at it to see where it is.

It is terrifying. If you walk into Neighbour then you're given swirling smoke that you can rarely escape from, and the volume increases to a roar. About 50% of deaths to Neighbour result in a crash to desktop, but 50% of the time you will be returned to the moment before he appears at the window. Progress is made by finding your way to the door and opening it in the dark. Whilst you expect, from the layout of the house, to be outside, you find yourself in another corridor. Using your phone draws Neighbours attention and he will chase you. Running into the corridor introduces another key element of phantom puzzles.

Your phone rings. It lights up and makes noise. You can suddenly see the fact that the corridor twists and turns into a sort of maze ahead. It also causes Neighbour to give chase. You are faced with a predicament – do you answer the phone and go back to darkness knowing that finding your way through the maze will be near impossible, or do you let it ring and hope you can outrun the terrifying thing behind you? In this case, the latter is easier because of how hard it is to navigating the maze, but the former is possible. If you do answer the phone you get the following message in an older male's voice:

“Star...Star...Good...Circle...Circle...Good….Star...Star...Good...Waves...Waves...Good...Cross...Cross...Good...Waves...Waves...Good. Perfect.”

Although as random as any other message received so far, this is actually a clue for a puzzle later on, which leads me to believe that you are "supposed" to answer the call.

The maze halts abruptly in a dead end and another locked door. If Neighbour is too close when you reach this part of the maze, you will die. If you've managed to stay far enough ahead, and not relied too heavily on your torch, you can Left Hand the door a few times, and eventually you will hear the sound of it unlocking. Open the door, crash to desktop.     

Phantoms

The following is an edited version of the last post I uploaded on RRE before The Bad Weather Incident. Everything from this point on will be new, or pieced together from scraps of stuff I still have written down from back then.

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At the end of the last session we had just received a couple of rather ominous phone calls, culminating in an unpleasant scratching at the door. 

The antagonist figures in RRE are always compared to the faceless monsters of the Amnesia franchise, and it is easy to see why.  To explain it better than I ever could, I’ll quote from one of the few mainstream sources in which reference to RRE can be found - a popular review of Amnesia: The Dark Descent.  Editing note: I see that I was one of those idiots I mentioned in my last post.

“[The enemies in Amnesia] are perpetually half-seen and obscured monsters, far more unsettling and frightening than anything seen in the Resident Evil or Silent Hill games.  They would not be topped in pants-shi**ing scariness for a few years, and only then by tiny soviet indie game, Rhapsody (Red Edition).  Both rely on the unknowable nature of the enemies to cloud their motivations.  Yes, the creatures in Amnesia will be called aliens by players, just as the dark, wispy apparitions in Rhapsody will be called ghosts, but they are foreign and weird and terrifying because you don’t know what they want from you.  You cannot bribe, you cannot threaten, you cannot beg.”

At the end of the review, the author returns to the comparison, and his opinions mirror my own almost exactly.  He does, however, fail to mention a relevant feature of the monsters of RRE, which leads me to believe he may never have actually played the game. 

“[Amnesia: The Dark Descent] utilises all the concepts of ‘gaming’ perfectly.  It is not a movie, a television show, or book – mediums which rely on showing you what they want you to see.  Instead, it’s a video game, and part of what makes that media so engaging is the ability to control your own fate.  How then, to stop your players from staring at the cracks in the set?  How do you ramp up the tension, when a player is free to do as they please?  How do you stop the player from staring at Godzilla until they can tell it is just a man in a costume?  In Amnesia, the sanity system that was so celebrated at the time of its release encourages you to avoid more than occasional glimpses of the monsters roaming the castle.  It’s clever, but ultimately heavy handed and it has aged poorly.  Returning to Rhapsody (Red Edition) for a moment, you can see that there are other ways of stopping your players from looking at the monsters head on.  Rather than drape them with in-game repercussions, simply make them so horrifying – so absolutely unpleasant, that the player chooses to interact with them as little as possible.”

There are a number of fan nicknames attributed to the antagonists of RRE, both as a collective, and as individuals.  With no word from the studio, the fan nicknames have become the canon within the player community.  The monikers to stick include ‘breathers’, (due to the breath on the outside of the window, and the heavy moaning sounds they make), ‘shakers’ (and the less intimidating ‘vibrators’ due to their violently blurred edges giving the appearance that they are in constant motion), and Rhapsodies (after a poster on the Gamefaqs forums claimed that they are proven to be the source of RRE’s title at a later point in the game).  I will be using the term that sprang to my mind the moment I fist saw one - ‘phantoms’, but also referring to each by their individual names where they exist.

So then, what are the phantoms?  Like so much about the game, nobody really knows.  I mentioned on IRC that I think I am currently about four or five updates from the end of Chapter One, and approximately seven updates from reaching a point further than anyone else has ever reached. Editing note: It was actually about two updates away from where anyone else ever reached.  There are three phantoms present in Chapter One (two of which are unavoidable encounters), named Neighbour, Ceiling Trap, and Chimera by fans.

Whilst all three vary in size and shape, there are certain things which tie them all together.  All of them emit wet, laboured breathing sounds with wails and moans of various pitch.  All of them are clad mostly in thick clouds of darkness, through which occasional body parts emerge.  All of them are blurred and fuzzy to look at, as if being viewed through cloudy water.  And all of them seem to really hate you.

The reason that I doubt that the Amnesia reviewer has every played RRE, is due to the fact that there is a very similar gimmick to the sanity system employed within the game.  To be caught by a phantom is death.  To be chased by a phantom is death.  But to even look at a phantom is death too.  With no health system in the game, the player character exists in only two states.  She can be alive or she can be dead.  Life is the game as we have explored so far, buggy as it may be.  Death is darkness, followed by a return to a recent checkpoint (or, nearly as commonly, a crash to desktop).  And in between those two stages is a gulf of swirling darkness.  Because each time you interact with a phantom, the world grows darker.  Each time you catch sight of one, the shadows grow longer and the corners seem deeper and the noises grow louder and you feel smaller.  You feel more helpless and the walls are swallowed in darkness, and soon the dark clouds surrounding the phantom have joined with darkness clouding your own vision and you know they are close, but not how close, and the urge to press right hand and flash your cell phone light, just for a second, becomes increasingly hard to ignore.  But that’s the last thing you want to do.  Because then the phantoms know exactly where you are.  

The Opening Sequence and 'The Tutorial'

It sickens me a little to read my own writing, but what can you do?

Below is an edited to bare-bones section of my second post. The final sentence really cracks me up now, so much so that I'm going to leave it in.

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And we’re back. I’m Viper Manor and this is the second installment of Lets Play Rhapsody (Red Edition). If you haven’t read the introduction, it’s worth going back, just to get an idea of how the game operates.

Double clicking the black and grey icon in the game folder does two things. Firstly, it automatically creates a shortcut to the game on the desktop, and secondly it launches Rhapsody (Red Edition). I’m still not entirely sure why it creates the shortcut this way, rather than asking you during installation, but nobody has ever really mentioned it online so I’m guessing it’s just a quirk.

WARNING: From this point on there will be heavy spoilers.

The first trick the game pulls on you occurs instantly. The screen goes black and the logo for Heaven Echo Studios comes up in white, and then fades away. And you wait. And wait. And wait. Then you press Esc to try and move on and nothing happens. In fact, nothing will happen until you move the mouse, at which point the darkness will shift into slightly different shades and depths. The change is subtle, but instantly noticeable, at which point you start doing it more because that’s all there is to do. And after about twenty seconds of this, there is a sudden blast of loud music.

Sound in RRE is one of the strangest elements, and I will be talking about it a lot throughout the thread. The sound files used are all strange in some way or another. In this first instance, the music lasts about six seconds and is just a simple tune hammered out on piano keys, but it sounds incredibly distant. It’s loud, extremely loud if your speakers are turned up to any real volume, but it sounds as if it’s coming from far away, almost as if you’re approaching a concert. I don’t know enough about musical terminology to describe it technically, but it sounds like an individual is absolutely pounding the keys.

I THINK I’ve worked out the tune of the notes and they are as follows.

Three A# followed by a B

Three G# followed by an A

Three F# followed by a G

Three E followed by an F

You’re made to jump before you’re even past RRE’s loading screen. Or so you think.

The music loops for several seconds with a second of silence in between each play, and will repeat six times before white writing appears in the bottom right corner of the screen. All it says is “Right hand” followed by a picture of a shift button. And then comes the second trick. If you press the right-hand shift button (on conventional keyboards sometimes referred to as the long shift) then the game proceeds. If you press the left shift, the one most commonly used in gaming, white text appears on the bottom left hand corner of the screen declaring “That is your left hand”.

So you press the right shift and suddenly there is light and movement and an Abit brand cell phone is appearing on screen in a hand that suggests we are in first person view. The music stops instantly as your character lifts the phone up past the screen (as if lifting it to their own ear), once more plunging the room back into darkness.

You have been in control the entire time. Even before the Echo Heaven Studios symbol fades in you are able to move the mouse and shift the darkness. The game opens with you in POV your character, standing in a pitch black room, completely alone and with no explanation how you got there, and it doesn’t even TELL you that it’s done it.

This may seem like a lot of words over mostly nothing, but I think it’s a brilliant example of how the game works. Less than a minute of play in and you’ve already been tricked into thinking the game is still loading, that the game has crashed, that you’re yet to start playing, and you’ve even been made to jump and introduced to the unique control system all in one go.

Because, the left shit is left hand, right shift is right hand controls are the heart of the game. They are the very essence of what you are doing in Rhapsody (Red Edition). Right shift makes you use your phone; left shift makes you use your free hand. And in this there is another brilliant bit of gaming, which I’ll explain after we take a look at the title screen.

Once you open the phone there is the sound of laboured breathing for a few seconds, quieter and playing only from the right hand speaker. How well distributed the sound is across the left and right speakers is a testament to the skill of the sound engineers. The breathing turns to static, the screen goes pitch black (which you only notice because the darkness grows thicker), and after a few seconds of loading, the title screen comes up.

The title screen is really simple. Black with white words and a white cursor (which is the only time you get a cursor). The options are New Game, Continue, Options and Exit. Options leads to the typical stuff, except for if you attempt to set controls. You can change the speed and sensitivity of your mouse, but the key bindings cannot be changed. Attempting to do so causes a single word to come up. ‘No’.

You cannot change the controls. It is brilliant. Why? Because it means you cannot do everything at once. The shift buttons are so far apart that it takes two hands to use both simultaneously, which means momentarily taking your hand off of the mouse, which means momentarily losing your ability to look around. The fact it openly dangles the option to change controls in front of your face, but doesn’t let you, shows just the kind of clever design work that makes Rhapsody (Red Edition) so unique.

Pressing New Game turns the screen pitch black again and the game greets you with your ringtone, this time just a single play through . The words ‘Chapter One’ fade up, then fade away.

You are still in darkness. You can move through it using the WASD keys, or crouch in it by pressing Ctrl. Despite all this, you are unable to do much of anything without pressing the right shift button.

Light. That is the single most important use of right hand in the game. Right hand is your torch button. Right hand uses your cell phone – answering it if it’s ringing, and causing you to thumb the centre button if it isn’t. Thumbing the centre button makes the phone light up for about eight-ten seconds, and illuminates part of wherever you’re standing. Thus, in dark places, and a lot of the game is almost entirely pitch black, you have to press the right shift every eight-ten seconds if you want to see where you are going.

You find yourself in a room, different from the one before the title screen. You are holding your phone out in one hand, the nails are painted in chipped purple nail varnish and you are wearing a black coat or jacket of some kind. The right hand holding the phone protrudes slightly into the screen in a manner that is instantly recognisable as a FPS view point. At this point I overestimated my own intelligence and tried to cycle through objects using the mouse-button, followed by the number keys, but none of the buttons did anything. At this point everything went dark again, so I pressed right shift. More light. Left shift did nothing.

I was already pretty scared. I can’t explain why, but something about the way the game had already broken the rules, coupled with the harsh and sudden sound (plus the picture of the meat cleaver mentioned in the introduction) had me feeling extremely uncomfortable. I remember that I actually went to the window and closed the curtain because I had this urge to keep looking over my shoulder and I was afraid that someone might be there. The game effortlessly cultivates a sense of unease.

The first room serves as a tutorial. The walls of the room are magnolia and covered in thick black mould. The floor is wooden and when you walk on it you can hear your footsteps and the creaking of wood. The walking sounds are outstanding, primarily because they are subtle. There are only three things of note within the room. Firstly, a wooden door marked with shallow gouges that resemble cat-claw marks at face height. If you use the left hand button on the door it shakes against the frame and the words ‘locked’ appear in white. Secondly, there is a dusty record player on an end table in the corner. If you approach it and use left hand, the needle comes down and the thing comes to life, but there is no music – just a continuous series of fuzzy bumping sounds. Thirdly there is a short cupboard in the wall which the left hand button opens to reveal a long dark tunnel. You can only get into the tunnel by crouching, which is something I only knew was possible due to having previously looked at the controls screen. It’s another clever thing – if you don’t know that you can crouch then you probably eventually stumble upon the controls screen in an attempt to work out what to do. Having seen the list of unchangeable key-bindings, it also confirms that your options are pretty much limited to walking, looking, crouching, and the two hands. Just as the opening moments of the game establish the tone and atmosphere of the rest of the game, the opening 'puzzle' introduces the player to every mechanic they will be using.

The tunnel is cramped and claustrophobic. Following the increasingly damp and mouldy walls leads your character to a sudden dead-end at which point your phone rings. Regardless of whether or not you are using your phone as a torch at the time, when it is ringing, your phone serves as a constant source of light. However, much like in the pre-title screen sequence, actually answering your phone (which is what happens if you press right hand whilst it is ringing) brings it up to your ear and causes darkness to descend. The game shows you this because most players will answer it the minute it starts ringing (if only to halt the horrible music), without thinking to leave the tunnel. And the second you answer it you are suddenly in total and complete darkness. The music stops. A sobbing voice in the right speaker burbles nonsense for a few moments, screams “One One One One” with increasing ferocity, then the game crashes and drops you to desktop.

I both love and loathe Rhapsody (Red Edition).

Introduction

Two years ago I tried to start a Let's Play of Rhapsody (Red Edition). It didn't get far. When the developers released a strange 'update' called Bad Weather, I got sidetracked and the whole thing sort of got away from me. Now I'm back and I want to tackle it. If you know about what happened with Bad Weather then hit me up via email. The whole Bad Weather episode feels like a bad dream now, so I'm going back to basics. Red Edition was not, as the developers claimed, a test of the game engine. In as much as any of the game was 'a real thing', Red Edition was the real thing. I know I'm going to get confused. I know I'm going to start referring to Red Edition as Bad Weather at some point, but it's the nature of the beast. For all intents and purposes just ignore everything you read prior to this. I'm going to try and see if I can recap everything important and give this stupid thing some kind of structure. Let's see if 2015 is my year.

I'm going to post the first post I made, but I'm editing out information which is no longer true or changed as the game was updated and patched and whatever else they did with it. I'm taking out all the cheery greeting stuff as well because it hardly seems appropriate any more. - VM

Below is a streamlined version of my original post made in August 2013.

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Before we go any further there are some things you need to know about Rhapsody (Red Edition).  Firstly, the title is too long to type over and over so from now on I will mostly be referring to it as RRE.  Secondly, the game is… strange.  The whole video games as art discussion has been brought up too many times for any really interesting new points to ever arise, and I would discourage people from talking about it in this thread, but I WOULD say that RRE is perhaps the best example of an ‘artistic’ video game I have ever experienced.  A big part of this comes from how surreal the game is, even from the very start.  The horror in RRE, and there is a lot of it, is constantly exacerbated by the bizarreness of what you are playing.  How much of this is just bad coding is a matter of much debate, but the overall effect is one that makes me feel very uncomfortable whenever playing.  Speaking of bugs, holy shit there are a lot of bugs.  Horror games pretending to crash or dropping you to desktop without warning are hardly a new thing, but RRE does it with gusto, and does it so seemingly randomly, that it feels like it can’t be on purpose.  Nothing works properly, nothing interacts the way it feels like it should, and again there is huge debate as to what is TRULY working correctly and what is just buggy. 

Rhapsody (Red Edition) is a game released for the PC some time in 2012 by Eastern European developer Heaven Echo Studios.  And there, in a single introductory sentence, we crash head first into one of the big problems about discussing the game.  Nothing is concrete.  Yes, the game is called Rhapsody (Red Edition), but so far as anyone is able to see, there is no alternative edition. At various points it is referred to as Bad Weather or Rhapsody: Bad Weather.  Yes, the game RUNS on the PC, but as far as I can tell it never had any form of commercial release anywhere in the world, and I gained access to it via the same method as anyone else who says they have played it.  I don’t want to be banned for :files: so I won’t be linking to it, but it’s out there.  Yes, the date on the opening screen says 2012, but there doesn’t seem to be any record to it existing before 2013.  Perhaps people with better google skills can prove me wrong, but the first reference to it that I can find is a single mention in a review for Amnesia the Dark Descent from February of 2013.  I can find no reference to any artistic studio with a portfolio of work named Heaven Echo Studios, nor as a business with a registered address.  So there, in a single introductory sentence, you get what RRE is about.  It’s a cliché, but nothing with the game is as it seems.  If you’re already sick of this you’ll want to stop reading now.

RRE does appear to be Eastern European in design.  The game is usually found on “the Russian quarter” of the internet.  4Chan seem to think it might be Estonian.  You control the point of view character, using the mouse to look around, the WASD keys to move and ctrl to crouch.  There is, to my knowledge, only one other thing you can do, and if RRE has a gimmick or hook, that thing is it, but I’ll get into that when we start Chapter One.

I don’t want to make this first post any longer, but I will explain one more thing before I start writing up the chapter I have already played.  The first thing I did after downloading the game was examine the folder ‘Rhapsody (Red Edition)’.  Inside were several things of note, alongside the normal game stuff. 

An executable file, the icon of which is a black square until you run the installer, at which point it changes to a mostly black square with a hint of grey.  This file launches the game.

A folder named ‘Install’ within which lies the installer.  I downloaded RRE three times in the end because I thought I had downloaded incomplete files.  This is because the installer itself isn’t labelled as such, but as ‘Finale.txt’

A jpeg called Right Hand which contains a photograph of a cell phone.  It is fairly modern looking, and is of a fictional brand named “Abit”.  Someone on 4chan claims that this might be Estonian for helpless or something, but I don’t know if that’s true.  The photograph is legitimate, in the sense that it is a photograph, not a drawing.  There is also a jpeg called…

Left Hand which contains a disturbingly graphic photograph of a blood-soaked meat cleaver – the first jump scare of the game begins before you even install it. 

I can't get away from this anymore.


I'm going back to Red Edition.