Say It In Red

Dear Listeners,Have you ever felt, particularly in late November when the rain picks up and keeps you housebound, that you are trapped in a strange house full of people you don't entirely know? In many ways, the distance between holiday revelry and horrifying mystery is smaller than we like to think. What would happen if all of our Thanksgiving reunions took place on an isolated, stormbound island? Would everyone in attendance keep a level head if a gramophone announced the most sordid sins of their past? If nothing else, you could take solace in knowing that it would be difficult for your own holiday gatherings to turn out as badly as those on Soldier Island in Agatha Christie's influential closed circle mystery, And Then There Were None. And what better way to experience this book, the practical foundation and inspiration for so many mysteries and visual novels, than to force one unwitting Umineko fan to read it, stop before the final culprit reveal, and then deliver all of her thoughts and theories on the air for everyone to enjoy. That's exactly what happened in this episode - Sara, along with Umineko reading guests KT Kelly and Raven, found out that Runa had never read And Then There Were None (despite having read about a dozen other Christie novels even as early as middle school). So really, there was nothing else to do but to give Runa her assignment, listen to her theories, and then see how she reacts to the final culprit reveal live on the air. You can even read all of Runa's Culprit Theories, including some truly wild things that didn't make it onto the episode!As we mentioned here, you can also Submit a short audio clip telling us about an Indie VN you've played, and we'll be including as many of those clips as possible in our upcoming Indie VN compilation track episode coming out in December! This is a public release of a previous Patreon-exclusive episode! You can, and we hope that you will, support us on Patreon at patreon.com/sayitinred where for as little as $3 a month you can get access to over four years of bonus content, along with advance schedules to let you know what we're reading in the future! And as always, if you enjoy our show please tell your friends and give us a rating and review wherever you listen.

1-4-2-6-2-10-5-1Please remember this combination. When you enter the elevator (FIRST FLOOR! Don't enter from the ground level or garage!) press the play button on this podcast. You should do this alone, ideally late at night or in the early morning when no one else will try to ride the elevator with you. Make sure the building you're in has at least 10 floors. Once you arrive on the fourth floor, wait 10 minutes while you listen to the podcast and then press the button for floor 2. Repeat this for each step: 10 minutes of podcast, elevator button, wait for the doors to open and close, and then listen in the solitary, sealed room of the elevator for another 10 minutes. By the end of this, you will have heard our entire podcast, giving you a full overview of why you absolutely should not play the elevator game (unless you are a catgirl searching for your cat girlfriend).For the height of the spooky season, Runa and Sara are discussing The Elevator Game with Catgirls(2022), in which catgirls Asahi and Kirin decide to play the fabled Elevator Game of urban legends lore. According to this game, if you enter an elevator, alone, and press the floor buttons in a particular sequence, you can travel to a strange and eerie Otherworld. You'll know when you reach that place because it will be entirely empty and devoid of life, and in the deep red sky you'll see a glowing cross. To return, you simply have to find the elevator you arrived in and complete the elevator game again... provided the elevator comes when you call it. After waiting outside in the snow for her girlfriend, Kirin, Asahi gets nervous and decides to rush in and try to find her. She quickly discovers that she, too, is now trapped within the Otherworld of the elevator game as well, which she wouldn't believe so readily had she not also had the paranormal experience of growing kitty ears and a tail months earlier. Through the process of solving puzzles scattered through the building's lobby and within the Otherworld, Asahi finds scattered notes that seem to reveal the inner thoughts and memories of the other people trapped there... including some from Kirin. As always, if you like our show and want to support us, please give us a rating and review on wherever you listen! You can also support us directly on Patreon at patreon.com/sayitinred. We don't advertise, so listener recommendations and word of mouth are the best way for new listeners to find us! 

How do I get to the convenience store from here? How does anyone get to a convenience store from anywhere? Where are you right now, and can I follow you for a while? I don't think I'm catching up even though I told you I was right behind you - I just didn't want you to worry or feel inconvenienced by my indecision. Hey, is it alright if we just sit here for a while? I think... yeah, even this much has worn me down this morning. Let me tell you about a game I played recently. A couple games, in fact. This month, Sara and Runa discuss the Milk series of games, covering both Milk Inside a Bag of Milk (2020) and Milk outside a bag of Milk (2021) and the surreal horror of mundane daily struggles with mental health, common chores, and our attempts to form connections. The first game focuses on you, the player, entering your name just before an unnamed girl entreats you to help her go to the store and buy a bag of milk. You have dialogue options, sometimes ranging from soft comfort to abject cruelty and often landing in sarcastic needling territory. As you accompany this girl, she reveals some small details about her daily struggles with life, chores, and the way she sees the world. "I'll try being a visual novel protagonist!" she says, and thus her thoughts appear as narration for us to read, even if she can't necessarily give them coherent voice. Once you've successfully helped her buy a bag of milk, she returns home to see her mother, represented as a blank, hollow-eyed mask, who tells her to go directly to bed. The second game picks up right here, immediately upon the girl's return to home as we now see her mother as a massive, formless being with sprawling arms and tendrils who injects a thin, needle-like finger into our protagonist's arm. From there, we help our protagonist, now trying out her life as an Adventure Game protagonist, search for her stray thoughts which have turned into fireflies. She longs for sleep and dreaming, and at the end of the night your choices will determine the vision she sees when she closes her eyes. This is, above all else, a game about plumbing the depths of your own mind, the ways we navigate society and life as we struggle with mental illness, the way we make sense of our pain and treatment, and the dreams we see when we can finally sleep. As always, if you like our show and want to support us, please give us a rating and review on wherever you listen! You can also support us directly on Patreon at patreon.com/sayitinred. We don't advertise, so listener recommendations and word of mouth are the best way for new listeners to find us!Content Warnings for this episode:Our episode contains mentions and discussions of suicide, self-harm, online harassment, and forced injection. 

August is not merely a month — it is an emotion. For some, the final month of Summer rings in its hottest days and the looming dread of a new school term. For others, it's a time steeped in nostalgia and the memories of summers' past. Perhaps your August is the feeling of bittersweet romance and the distant promise of your future. Perhaps, even, as the seasons turn you feel, more strongly than anything, a longing for 1992.This month, Sara and Runa discuss Dōkyūsei: Bangin' Summer, a 2022 remake of a game from thirty years prior and one of the very first dating sims to gain widespread popularity and acclaim. Playing as Takurou, an extremely horny high school senior in the final weeks of his last summer break, you find yourself wandering the city to find girls, talk to girls, flirt with girls, take girls on dates, and answer quiz questions about their outfits in exchange for cash prizes. There are no fewer than 14 girls for Takurou to pursue, five of whom are his classmates as the game's title suggests while the other nine are adult women Takurou meets around town. Even in this early entry to the genre, you can see dozens of themes, mechanics, tropes, innovations, and gags that are still common thirty years later. In fact, if you ever feel that you may have a new, fresh, and never-before-seen idea to inject into a dating sim... play Dōkyūsei first. There's a high chance that one of the original entries into the genre has already beat you to the punch.As a heads up for listeners, Dōkyūsei: Bangin' Summer is an adult game and some routes feature explicit depictions of sexual assault and violence. We've included timestamps below for the sections where we discuss these events. You can also play the game without the 18+ patch which excises a lot of this content, though we found that playing without the 18+ patch skips large sections of certain scenes, even those which are not H scenes along with some potential graphical bugs that are solved by applying the 18+ patch.Content Warnings for this episodeTeacher/Student route discussion - 1:36:45 to 1:45:15Discussion of Sexual Assault - 1:46:30 to 2:06:20