Gemini Rue, an IGF 2010 Student Showcase winner under its previous title, Boryokudan Rue, is Joshua Nuernberger’s first full-length commercial title that successfully follows up on the promising path already travelled by the developer’s first adventure game title, La Croix Pan. Dave Gilbert’s Wadjet Eye Games is to publish the game today, 24th of February, and a demo was made exclusively available at GameFront yesterday.
The game, a film noir/sci-fi adventure, is of two separate halves: Players control Azriel Odin, with the help of his partner Kane Harris, sneaking into the colony of Barracus in search of an informant known as Matthieus Howard. Interwoven between Azriel’s sections also figures the mysterious prisoner-patient Delta-Six, an amnesiac confined to and conditioned in a sterile facility with totalitarian, Pavlovian means.
An equal split between the two halves exists not only narratively, but also visually: On the surface of Barracus (a “New Pittsburgh,” as it is described), where habitable conditions are sustained by weather towers, where the constant presence of rainfall plagues the colony, its hammering rattle contrasting strongly with the sterile silence and cleanliness of the facility Delta-Six remains confined in. Where Delta-Six is a silent, worn-down man deprived of his humanity and personality, Azriel is a keen-eyed man of action and freedom, constantly entangled in danger, shootouts and the narrowest of escapes.
Did I yet mention pie, the strangest of McGuffins? There exists so much pie in the world of P.B., in fact, that it quite possibly takes the cake of having the most pie in a video game ever. Even the primary villain – a massive magical pie that has eluded P.B. W.B. and ultimately led him to his ponderous predicament – counts for this quota! It is fitting, then, that the game has been rendered with plenty of piety (as you could hopefully gather from my description above), going further than most in its reappropriation of its influences, like the silent filmic era, by using as condiments for instance title cards for explicating plot and having pun-filled subtitles for level names.