Played 4th-6th April
Online version played
Playtime: 1hr 10mins (one ending reached)
Link to Braincase on the Spring Thing 2020 ballot
Content warning: As noted on the ballot, Braincase features scenes of violence, hunting, police brutality, strong language and some flashing graphics. This review will discuss police brutality and violence.
Spoiler warning: this review will feature vague structural spoilers for the story and climax of the game.
Braincase is a sci-fi police procedural game written in Twine. The player, as a police technician, explores the memory implant of a person who died in a police incident. Most of the game is spent exploring the victim’s memories as individual vignettes, interspersed occasionally with police officers trying to influence the technician’s report.
We start the game in what seems like a fairly mundane police office, learning that a memory device is on the way. I’d describe Braincase’s setting as “soft cyberpunk”. There’s futuristic technology like holographic monitors and sensory VR headsets, but we’re mostly just in an office watching memories being played back.
That understates the setting a lot, but I think Lance’s worldbuilding is a strength of Braincase. There are instances where a cyberpunk-y tech term is dropped on you and you click a link to learn more – maybe this could have been better integrated into the main story. But these definitions indicate that a lot of thought went into how this setting came to be, why its technology exists and how it’s being abused in the modern world. For example, I love the early detail that the Highway Patrol Agency is using indiscriminate EMP devices intended for the military – it explains the economy and history of why EMP devices exist in the world, and it neatly establishes Braincase’s major theme of policing and the abuse of power. (More on this later.)
Once we’ve settled in and met our police colleagues, the memory device is delivered, and we get to explore a list of individual memories of its deceased owner. Braincase starts with an unassuming, barebones Twine layout, pretty similar to the default Twine CSS, but here Lance pulls a few neat tricks. When the memory implant is being used, a sidebar menu appears with undo and save options. I would prefer to have these options available throughout the game, particularly towards the end to explore alternative endings, but I’m a sucker for a diegetic interface. Adding to this are some lovely datamoshed visual effects in the background and over the text to indicate when a memory has been corrupted. There’s also a thoughtful touch where, once we finally identify the deceased, their name is swapped into the memories.
It’s not all quite perfect – there are instances where the styling gets in the way. For example, there are scenes where a sky-blue background is used, but this makes it hard to read the blue-green hyperlinks. There are a few typos throughout, especially where the wrong tense is used. (Braincase switches between present and past tense deliberately to distinguish between the player character’s experiences and the victim’s memories, which is neat, but I think a few errors slipped through the net.) Just little mistakes, nothing unforgivable, but maybe Braincase could have done with a little more polish.
(Minor spoilers for the game’s story are about to begin!)
Over the course of the game, our character dips in and out of this memory list, trying to figure out why certain colleagues are getting antsy about what she’ll find. The content warnings give us a good idea of what’s waiting for us – and indeed, the vignettes gradually build to a climatic incident resulting from police brutality.
I’m completely happy with Lance’s handling of this theme. Braincase doesn’t try to make us feel sympathy for the cop, thank God, or depict the climatic incident as the result of stress or provocation. Instead, we are shown how the incident is the straightforward result of power and revenge fantasies. The “a few bad apples” defence is cited in-game, but that mention of military-grade weaponry in the Highway Patrol, plus a few other asides from the player character, make it clear that overuse of force in the police department is a pattern rather than an occasional fault.
(There’s an unspoken question about police surveillance, too, when the implant’s owner realises that their implant’s data is accessible without their informed consent. Is this surveillance – and by extension, our picking-over of the deceased’s personal memories – also an act of police violence? Lance stops short of challenging the player directly here, but perhaps the player can engage with it – I think it’s possible to ensure a final act of brutality by blaming the victim in the final report despite the evidence, but I haven’t yet checked this outcome.)
Lance apologises in the author comments on the ballot for releasing such a heavy game during the COVID-19 era, but I think this is an instance where current events help a lot with context. As I write this, we’re on lockdown in the UK, with a few extra powers given to the police to help enforce it. Gosh, they’re enjoying themselves. Every couple of days we hear about cops intimidating newsagents for selling easter eggs (a non-essential food item!) or following hikers with drones to shame them or some other petty incident. And that’s just surveillance – you can take your pick of police acts of physical violence and terrorism, especially racist incidents (Rodney King, Michael Brown and the Ferguson protests, etc, etc). We don’t need to interrogate or debate whether Braincase’s police force would really abuse their authority so violently, and Braincase doesn’t need a hard cyberpunk dystopia to explore it.
Ribbons: This is the first game I’ve played for Spring Thing 2020, so as far as I know it’s sweeping the board right now. But I’d especially put it in the running for Best Setting (or Worldbuilding) and Best use of Visual Effects.
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