She Sees Red is an interactive FMV title in where we play as a killer whose crimes are being investigated by a detective after she is called into the scene. Our actions in the past will affect what she discovers in the present as she saunters around the nightclub looking for clues. Who are we, and what is our purpose for doing this? That is something that not even we the player knows. What we do know upon starting up the game is that we are holding onto a man after jamming a pencil deep into his ear as he slowly dies. It is as sudden an intro that there can be, and before we have much time to acclimate to this development, we immediately have a choice to make. Do we take care of the body or just leave it be. Make your choice quickly, or the character will randomly pick one of the options once the timer runs out.
Every choice has an effect on the story as the game proceeds to tell you so right off the bat. To get that through, your very first choice will be whether you want to start the game or not. If you choose no, it will cheekily go straight to the end credits, and that’s that. The first playthrough is quite intense as you have to make choice after choice without really knowing what’s going on. You’ve just murdered someone and apparently have some sort of mission in that nightclub. It is further intensified thanks to the flash-forwards in the story into the present as the detective pieces together your actions, and you can’t help but second guess yourself at every turn. You only have two choices for any given event, though with the small time-frame you are given to think upon them and not knowing when they are going to pop up, it will still require pretty quick judgment calls on your end.
Most of the choices are deeply interconnected and affect each other in different ways. There are four endings to acquire and fifty-six unique scenes to see. That is all packed into an adventure that will last less than half an hour to get through, so they are packed in pretty dense. This is a title you will need to play through multiple times to understand the story. Whether your first play-through went well or poorly, chances are that you’ll still be left wondering just what in the world that was all about. From the start, none of your options will be locked off, and you can easily diverge into different branching paths that don’t explain critical things. Yet that knowledge will still allow you to piece together the bigger picture once some more fragments of info eventually fall into place on future playthroughs. Due to that openness, its storytelling may be a tad obtuse, but also gives it an air of mystery you will strive to solve.
A key thing to note is that while your decisions are timed and are technically quick-time events, they don’t occur at unfair random moments, such as pressing a random button to dodge or something along those lines. They pop up in quiet moments, usually the ‘calm before the storm,’ then are tasked with simply clicking on one of two things. An example being a situation where you are hiding under a desk and must quickly decide whether you attack the man in the room or try to sneak away. It is more like being timed while reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book than what you typically associate with QTEs in video games. Another thing you may imagine when thinking of FMVs in video games is campy humor and acting. That is also not the case here. It is an entirely serious plot performed by actually decent actors that very much suit their respective roles.
Having said that, it is worth mentioning that this is a Russian studio, and the cast was originally speaking in Russian. The title defaults to having an English dub, which while not terrible, it does cause lip-syncing issues and lacks the emotion given by the actors. I’d recommend switching it to Russian and turning on subtitles for a more enticing viewing experience. You can switch at any time simply by pausing the game and going into the options menu. One thing I can levy against this title is that it does start to get increasingly repetitive after the second playthrough. They include an option to skip the scene you are on if you’ve already seen it, though it takes doing that several times to get to the next choice. Some you can’t even skip through until some time has passed. It would have been a massive time saver to give us a ‘skip to next choice’ option as well, considering how many times we’ll likely be replaying it.
In total, it only took me around two hours to go through everything it had to offer. Considering this title is only $8 and the high quality of everything from the actors to the camerawork, that playtime seems fair. It is, as previously stated, a dense experience and has no pointless filler to it. Everything serves a purpose and has an impact when you get to take the reins in the story. I wouldn’t call the actual plot revolutionary by any means, yet it is an interesting tale with the journey itself proving to be a memorable one. It has romance, tragedy, action, and much more all packed into its short time frame without any of them feeling out of place. She Sees Red is an ambitious title that really made good use of what resources they had and succeeded in creating something worthwhile with it. If you are a fan of FMV games or simply love stories where your choices matter, She Sees Red is well worth considering.
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