Update 1: Initiating Memory Wipe…
A short pan-up shot of an unknown planet, satellites hovering in orbit above it. Gemini Rue is one of those stories where the actual story is out of chronological order, so we’ll be seeing a lot of places now that we won’t see again for quite some time. There’s a long fade to black, then this pops up:
Like a lot of modern adventure games, Gemini Rue uses colors to distinguish between who is speaking at any given time. The game is voiceacted (by Wadjet Eye’s stock team of like, two people) but honestly if you’ve played any of Wadjet Eye’s other games you’ve heard all of these VAs before.
Yeah, the portraits in this game are kinda bad. It’s one of those things where I think they were trying to go for Gabriel Knight’s artstyle the way that the Blackwell games did (ie; not having animated portraits like King’s Quest or Dagger of Amon Ra) but they look kinda bad in 1080p. A lot of characters don’t have portraits at all, so expect a lot more full screenshots for dialogue than Dagger of Amon Ra had.
Meet Delta Six. We won’t be seeing much of him for a while, due to a plot twist that most people playing this game will see coming long before the writers expected them to.
: “What are you doing to me?”
: “Stop… please…”
From this moment onward, we’re given the ability to look around the room. Most things won’t elicit a response, since the scripted dialogue is still playing.
There is one thing we can do that WILL elicit a response - and that’s try to use the straps binding Delta Six to the chair.
The suspiciously electric chair-looking hood clamps down on Delta Six’s head, and the needle in the back plunges into his neck. While most adventure games would be about finding a way out of this situation, Gemini Rue is content to just let you watch.
: "Argh!’
We won’t understand what the entire point of the opening cutscene is for a while - this is actually the last time we’ll be seeing Delta Six for what will probably be several updates to the LP. Instead, let’s meet our real protagonist.
: “People change in five years…”
: “He’s not with the Boryokudan anymore, I told you.”
: “We’re already an hour late. I can’t stay in orbit unnoticed forever.”
: “What do you want me to do?”
: “Find him. Get a new extraction point or we’re getting out of here.”
: “Alright. I’ll start looking through the city. I’ll probably have to ask one of the locals. He moves around all the time.”
: “Alright. One more hour. I’ll be waiting.”
: “Azriel out.”
: “Matthius Howard… where are you?”
There’s a brief yet annoying series of tutorial pop-ups. Basically, Gemini Rue is much better than Dagger of Amon Ra in that right-clicking on something brings up a smaller version of the menu that took up the entire top of the screen in most Sierra games.
From left to right, we have Look, Interact, Talk, and Kick. Azriel starts with three items - his gun, a set of lockpicks, and his totally-not-a-cellphone “communicator”. Alternatively, we can just left-click on most things and Azriel will use whichever action is most appropriate for it. Examining the photos on the wall gets us:
: “People have been missing in Gemini for months now.”
: “The Boryokudan aren’t killing them, but nobody knows where they’re going.”
As Azriel walks down the street, the terminal (that egg-shaped thing in the foreground directly to the right of the inventory pop-up in the last screenshot) rings out.
Allow me to explain. Wadjet Eye are HUGE fucking fans of having stupid “puzzles” in which the protagonist looks shit up on their cellphone. I don’t quite know why this is, but EVERY SINGLE ONE of their games have it and it pisses me off every time I see it, mostly because it gets progressively dumber (see: the Jewish-only search engine in The Shivah which required that you know exactly what the developers wanted you to put into it to progress the plot) every time they re-use it. I get that SNATCHER had Jordan and Policenauts had a dedicated encyclopedia button (on the Saturn at least), but this just kinda seems like lazy game design. Fortunately, Gemini Rue is not particularly bad with this and it kinds of fits in with the weird, Shadowrun-like technology mashup theme they’ve got going on.
The kick animation is kind of wanting, but it’s there.
: “There goes the static.. for now, at least.”
Even though we’ve fixed the terminal, Azriel can’t acess it right now due to it requiring an ID card to operate. This means we might as well keep going down the street. Interestingly, we have to at least try to log into the terminal in order to set an event flag for the next screen - I can tell you that in a lot of Sierra games, that wouldn’t be the case.
Oh look, a bum! In the grimdark future of whatever year this is supposed to take place in, I’m willing to bet that somewhere, floating out there in the universe, is a book written by Laura Bow (with a foreword by Detective Halligan) on how to exploit bums for fun and profit. I bet he’s got an ID card we could buy off him with some booze or something..
: “Hey-”
: “Either they’re totally spaced out from the juice withdrawal, or they’re too weak to talk.”
Or we could try this guy. Surprisingly, we at no point exploit a bum in this game.
: “Hi there.”
: “What are you doing out in the rain? You could catch pneumonia.”
: “Don’t you know you should be indoors? It’s a mining day.”
We get a couple of dialog options here. Kane Harris is the guy on the other end of the communicator, so let’s ask this guy about Matthius.
: “Did you check the planetary database?”
: “What?”
: “They have terminals all over the city. You should check them out. They might be able to tell you something.”
: “Where can I find one of those?”
This is kind of one of those moments where the game’s event flags falter. We’ve actually already seen one - it was that terminal just one screen ago. I chalk it up to Azriel possibly being a distant descendent of Steve Dorian.
: “Well, there’s probably one down the block. You can’t miss 'em.”
: “Alright. Thanks.”
The dialog is a little different here if we had already inspected the terminal before talking to the shopkeeper, but I hadn’t done that and had already made a save so let’s just roll with the other way this can go.
: “Did you find your guy?”
: “No, I need a card to access it.”
: “You from off-world or something?”
: “Yeah, police business. We had to bypass the docking ring.”
: “You’re not from this system, are you?”
: “Don’t worry, I won’t report you.”
: “Things have been bad since the war.”
: “We need any help we can get to turn things around.”
: “Well, I’d like to help against the Boryokudan in any way I can.”
: “So I guess you could borrow my card if you really need it.”
: “Thanks. Appreciate it.”
You can also lie to the shopkeeper about why Azriel is on Barracus, but it doesn’t really matter. The game kind of instructs us at this point to look at the card in Azriel’s inventory, so let’s do that.
There are a few places where the game will reward you for paying attention to stuff. This isn’t necessarily one of them, but keep that in mind for.. let’s say the next update. Let’s go back to that terminal now.
Opening the terminal gives us a short tutorial on how we can either drag topics from the “communicator” menu in the bottom-left into the search box or just type in the search manually. Before we go looking up Matthius Howard, let’s look at a couple of other terms that have come up. We’ll start with “juice”.
You can see on the left that searching for “juice” also gave us the address of a medical station. The address is 3386 Hollister Drive. Next, let’s try looking up “boryokudan”.
The terminal won’t tell us anything about it, but the Boryokudan are basically the Yakuza. In fact, I think they outright tell you at one point (much later on) that the Boryokudan are literally the Yakuza just having taken in a wider, non-Japanese demographic since the advent of space travel. With no other terms worth looking for, let’s look up Matthius Howard now.
We now know where Matthius lives, though as Azriel points out, we have no idea where Hibiscus Highrise is. By the way, see that part about his job? Remember that for the next update.
Oh, good. We’ve got an address, and the terminal actually provides us with a map as well.
: “I can probably make it there on foot.”
It’s right down the street! How convenient. Before we go, there is one other thing we can check, namely the news.
An ex-assassin working with the Boryokudan Space Yakuza who now works with the police? That’d have to be a pretty edgy guy.. I bet he’d have a name like those OCs made by ten year olds on Deviantart, something like “Coldsteel Bloodfang” or “Azriel Odin”… oh, wait. Yes, this is actually Azriel they’re talking about. Let’s leave the terminal now.
Well, that about does it for this update. Next time, we’ll invade a man’s privacy and see where it goes from there.