The Red Strings Club (PC)
There seems to be a rather small but still impressively populated niche genre of indie games where the focus is on bartending or drink mixing as part of an unraveling narrative. The process of serving up liquors or other beverages while speaking with interesting characters has lead to games like Necrobarista, Coffee Talk, and a game I previously covered: VA-11 HALL-A: Cyberpunk Bartending Action. VA-11 HALL-A might even be the game that kicked off this small subgenre, but whereas most games seem to be trying to build off it and take it in new directions, The Red Strings Club initially sounds like it’s essentially copying the concept completely with its own cyberpunk bartending game about mixing drinks and changing lives. However, while the surface level seems similar, The Red Strings Club does manage to feel like a very different experience from its likely inspiration.
The Red Strings Club isn’t just about meeting colorful characters from behind a countertop. There is a central plot that the game follows that ends up told in many different forms of play. Creating organic implants with a lathe, solving point-and-click puzzles, navigating high pressure dialogue choices, and of course mixing drinks all come up across the course of the experience, with the idea these are all events tied together by the red strings of fate. The game does kick off with a flash-forward to one of its main characters falling out of a building as they are about to die so the ending is practically set in stone from the get go, but exact actions taken along the way inform the path the story takes and how satisfying the conclusion will be is based on the influence you held over characters and their mindsets.
Most of the game does center around The Red Strings Club unsurprisingly. Donovan works as the bartender of the unusual Red Strings Club, a bar with an uncanny, almost supernatural draw and drinks that seem to twist the emotions of those who imbibe them. Donovan uses his profession as a way of learning vital information and brokering it to others, but the stakes become more personal than expected when a damaged android named Akara-184 walks in. Donovan’s hacker boyfriend Brandeis uncovers shocking information in the android’s brain, the megacorporation Supercontinent Ltd. beginning to roll out a strange new program that jeopardizes the free will of not only the city’s heavily augmented cyborg population but people without implants as well. Referred to as SPW, Donovan ends up trying to discover as much as he can about the program in the hopes that he can provide Brandeis with the information needed to prevent its implementation, but as you begin to speak with many people related to Supercontinent and SPW, the situation becomes far less clear cut.
Once you get the basics of the mystery, the bartending portions of the game become about speaking with bar patrons about their ties to the program and trying to identify the key points needed to understand it and potentially dismantle it. To that end, most everyone coming to the club can provide vital clues in learning the full truth, be they someone like the flirtatious marketing director Larissa, the tight-lipped but weary corporate lawyer Naima Cosse, or even the eccentric young man behind the SPW himself Edgar Coldstream. Your conversations with these characters can involve dialogue choices that might influence how willing they are to give information, but quite often, this cast of colorful characters will allow you to choose every dialogue option that appears in the menu. However, that doesn’t mean they’ll be forthcoming with the answers you’re looking for, and that’s where the drink mixing comes into play.
To make your patrons properly pliant, you need to mix them up special drinks. Each character has a set of moods called Soul Nodes that appear in front of them while mixing drinks. These can be simple things like Regret, Sympathy, and Vanity that can feel like natural pairings for certain lines of questioning, but other times you might want someone Paranoid instead to break down their emotional walls, even if it turns much of their response into a rambling mess. The game doesn’t just stick to normal moods either, as determining how Zen or Madness might manifest means sometimes you’re left wondering which Soul Node will actually give you meaningful answers. The complexity of the drink mixing increases as you need to use each new ingredient to move your red cursor to the Soul Nodes and match their orientation. Ice is key to shrinking the cursor’s size, and some concoctions are too big for the shot glass if you don’t start off by shaking them into a mixed drink separately. Your errors won’t hurt you and you can keep trying until you’ve activated a Soul Node so the interactivity is mostly just an interesting way to manage your options, but it’s an enjoyable way of doing so despite the lack of punishment for mistakes.
Once you’ve served the drink you can start to interrogate them, and many will offer you chances to serve them new drinks to further have control over how they’ll react to a question. Your notes keep track of vital information pretty well, but there’s an interesting feature after meeting with these bar patrons. Akara-184 quickly cleans up and assists at the bar, and to cap off your questioning of characters, the android will give you a small quiz about what you uncovered as well as determining how good a read you got on the patron. Not only do you want to pay attention to these visitors now because of their wit, interesting personalities, and how they weave into the cyberpunk mystery, but keeping track of the information can help you pass this quiz and earn special rewards. These can be simple things like pills you can slip into drinks to make patrons forget you have interrogated them so you can tackle questions with new moods active or get around characters who might bristle or otherwise restrict your interrogation, but the right quiz answers might also trigger special events like a unique bar visitor. These quizzes are challenging but achievable so long as you’ve been paying attention, and they also help Akara-184 develop as a character. Not only is the freshly created android getting a general picture of the mystery she’s helping you solve, but she’s learning about real human interaction, the player often answering questions that help her determine her character journey. She’s also one of the best sources for drawing out information on the rather mysterious Donovan, the pair doing a good job adding more personality to the club sections of the game while Brandeis is off in the city doing work.
Speaking of, moments outside of the club don’t get to be as direct about how you influence the red strings of fate, but you can see the results of choices unfold as Brandeis speaks with others or eventually gets his time to shine during a point and click section where all the information you’ve gathered comes together in the finale. Certainly more outwardly comedic than most of the other characters, Brandeis has a youthful, easygoing attitude that makes him a good foil to the reserved and clever Donovan and the fledgling personality of Akara-184. He’ll definitely be throwing out the most jokes, but he also gets some of the most serious moments like trying to talk someone out of jumping off a bridge. These tense moments with high stakes are the kind of story points where your choices do matter even if the ending will tie whatever narrative path you took up in a similar bow to other outcomes, and the ending is certainly one that can leave you with a few conflicted feelings, especially if certain choices get referenced during it. The actual point and click puzzles are similar to the drink mixing in that they’re low pressure but choosing certain options determines how things unfold, but Brandeis’s sections have meaningful and weighty dialogues as well on top of the gameplay shift.
The genetic implant pottery that crops up near the start is a relatively minor thing in the grand scheme and doesn’t last long, but it’s oddly satisfying to shape the implants as you decide which ones certain patients will get. It’s also an interesting way to introduce the cyberpunk world’s built-in systems and give you a behind the scenes look at Supercontinent Ltd. that prepares you distrust them before the many bartending conversations work to add more grey morality to the picture. The willingness to shift away from the core gameplay styles keep Red Strings Club from feeling too mired in constant conversation, although the writing’s quality and the approach to learning more about the SPW certainly keeps you pressing forward through dialogues as it unravels at a steady pace. You should still mostly come for the alcohol-assisted interrogations rather than its deviations into other gameplay types, but they allow the plot to step out of the club and actually wrap up the threads you’ve been following since the game kicked off.
THE VERDICT: When everything comes together in The Red Strings Club, emotions can definitely run high as the payoff to the narrative you helped craft starts pulling at your heart strings. Its three core characters are easy to get invested in and the way they interact with each other and others involves plenty of amusing and interesting writing, and the cyberpunk mystery you slowly uncover has interesting moral layers to be explored and discussed. The drink mixing evoking different moods to elicit different responses is a smart way of having the mixology influence the plot, and while you are working to a mostly foregone conclusion, the narrative path is made more interesting based on the choices you make and the way you interact with the bar patrons. While gameplay is often simple and not too challenging, the narrative elements that ride atop those moments of interaction ensure this sci-fi story is still fascinating.
And so, I give The Red Strings Club for PC…
A GREAT rating. The Red Strings Club takes an interesting approach to its gameplay, the actual actions not being punished much if you mess up but the choices made in performing these actions carrying a good degree of weight. Picking the right Soul Node can open up new lines of questioning and provides new clues as to what is going on with Supercontinent Ltd., and while the drinks have the most important role to play because of how the game is structured, you still have moment like crafting cyborg implants or hacking computer systems where other small choices lead to the specific branch of the story you end up following. Most of the game’s major players all have memorable personalities and interesting writing, and helping Akara-184 develop emotionally throughout adds an interesting secondary goal on top of the SPW investigation. The Red Strings Club is mostly about that story and the dialogue that sustains it does so excellently. The game manages to explore its subject matter in-depth and chooses a narrative route that doesn’t just outright villainize something that sounds so clear cut when it is first introduced. Through the lens of a cyberpunk future with a mostly cybernetic populace, we are able to have complex discussions about free will, benevolence, technological progress, and other topics that work into the mystery you’re trying to solve.
Suffice it to say, The Red Strings Club escapes the shadow of VA-11 HALL-A despite what feels like a suspicious amount of similarities. The purpose of drink mixing is interesting, the discussions are focused on a narrative with moral questions to consider, and the main goal is to see the investigation of Supercontinent to its end. VA-11 HALL-A might have the better characters because they’re the main focus and its music is definitely catchier compared to The Red Strings Club’s atmospheric approach, but the overall plot and the degree of influence your actions have on it shine brighter here, ensuring both games are great in their own ways.