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smutgusher · 5 months ago

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Game Review: Clinical Trial

Clinical Trial, available to download for free on Itch.io, is the triumphant return of Homie, someone whose absence from the internet I have felt keenly. It is a deft combination of their skill in drawing, writing, and animation, with additional art from peachy and music from desesseintes, to create a joyful, freely shared work of emotionally and sexually charged art.

The opening gambit of the game is that of a severely disadvantaged person entering a clinical trial to keep themselves financially above water. They believe themselves to have undiagnosed ADHD, though a formal diagnosis was beyond their means, quickly slipping through the cracks of their gaps in health insurance. They work in the highly exploitative food service industry with exhausting shift patterns, their housing arrangements are poor, and they have barely any time to exist on their own terms. The time they have, they spend drawing.

Angel's character is a very realistic reflection of the experience of modern poverty. Since the late 90s especially and long beyond that, the working poor have faced greater pressure and stiffer burdens in life, through worsening access to housing, systematic erosion of their rights of workers, and a sustained and intensifying drain of every resource they have, until there's almost no room left to be themselves. Being mentally ill, a minority, or an otherwise marginalized person compounds this struggle for life. Angel is squeezed in from all sides by their precarious circumstances, forced to face everyday life without a helping hand from anyone, expected to be the responsible adult and deal with their own problems, take in anything and everything that others hand out without ever complaining or having a will of their own, and to help everyone else on demand. A second generation immigrant, their only contact with their family is occasional messages to their siblings. Angel is otherwise friendless, and the little positive human contact they have is with anonymous strangers online who enjoy their art (which was created by peachy, and makes a lovely stylistic contrast to the game art) and say as much. None of what they do in life is their true calling, but there is nothing they can do about it.

In contrast to Angel, Lee, the staffer overseeing the clinical trial, is walled in by his responsibilities as a medical professional. These come up hard against the reality of his own feelings. His strong façade breaks early in the face of Angel's considered questioning about the details of the trial and how it often flies in the face of the practical circumstances of those taking it. This is where you can begin to feel Lee's own deep frustrations at his lot in life. He has not been blessed with great success, with his ambitions to be a doctor worn down until he finds himself a mid-level nurse in a run-down clinic owned by a private equity company and overseen by an absent boss. He lives on his own, deals with his own problems and runs his own life, yet his intense self-discipline feels like it barely holds together.

Each of their personalities are presented not only through incredible character writing, but lovingly expressive artwork in both talk-sprite for dialog and pixel art for the movable character, to show the different spaces the characters inhabit. The focal points of each area of the game allow for the talk sprites to frame the action on each side of the picture, making the back-and-forth dialog flow as if you were observing the conversations in real life. This is used heavily to show body language, too - the sprites are drawn to around the waist, allowing for a full range of hand and bodily expression.

Lee is stoic and so very subtly expressive, his feelings told through his slow, mild and careful expressions, and through the constant wringing of his hands. Angel is very outwardly expressive too, but in a subdued way - chewing on the pull-cords of their jacket, giving small smiles and looking all over the room as they talk. These both show fundamental, unspoken aspects of their personality and mental state that dialog and facial expressions don't cover. Pauses in dialog are used very well, allowing for heavy or awkward moments to sit for the time they need, and in particular to express Lee's repressed personality.

The sound design is the cherry on top. Music is used sparingly, and to great impact, and outside of its use are immersive background noises that set each scene. Sound effects in response to actions are used well, from soft-toned menu sounds to naturalistic in-game sound effects that are never overused.

The remainder of this review contains spoilers.

Something the sound design worked to do was to sell the unsettling atmosphere from very early on. It goes beyond simple neutral ambiance, with ominous rumbles fading up in the sound mix. The soundtrack was not heavy handed in its use to set a scene, often coming up to finish the job after the soundscape brought the atmosphere to the level of a slow-burning dread.

Indeed, it is evident that not all is right from the start. Lee subtly betrays his growing obsession with Angel early, through minor facial expressions in reaction to their body language and outward self-expression - even as early as how taken aback he was from the idle doodles all over the flier for the clinical trial - to his struggle to repress forwardness with Angel over touching their arm during the weekly procedure, the oversharing of his personal life and background, and even in his aforementioned willingness to break character and express his true feelings about the aspects of the clinical trial that brought them together.

As Lee pushes against his own restraints, he leans on his professional life to inform his personal life. His medical training is developed in the game into a quietly stated medical fetishism. First, in the clinical setting, with his wandering eyes, his measurement, monitoring of and commenting on Angel's vital signs, and repeatedly, inadvertently stating that he's going to touch Angel's arm, catching himself and correcting it to a request every time. Details of clinical procedures, such as the accurate sequence of blood testing and administration of injections, and the busywork of the day-to-day job, from online courses to wrangling with insurance companies, sell an authenticity to Lee as a nurse practitioner. This makes the small and gradual ways he oversteps his professional boundaries feel significant.

In kind, Angel begins to respond to this treatment with increasing comfort, and at that point, the taboo of an intimate doctor-patient relationship was fully broken. They reveal more to each other, about their personal lives.

For example, the shrimp. The only pop of bright color in the muted, earthy tones of the run-down clinic, through Angel the player has the unexpected opportunity to learn about Lee's hobbyist passion and special interest. He infodumps in the most adorable way, and makes you as a reader feel closer to him as a character, just as Angel does.

You can feel a budding relationship, and you can also feel the deep reluctance of Lee to bring it over the line into the romantic.

However, nothing good in the world we're handed can last.

One week, Angel arrives in the clinic. The movement of their player sprite is slower, more labored, and examining every object in the office garners no dialog and a slack, miserable expression on their talk sprite. Going into the office, Angel has clammed up, no longer responding to Lee, who can tell something is wrong. He tries inexpertly to get through to them, until they snap, lash out, and leave. Knowing of Angel's job, uncaring roommates, and familial estrangement, he looks out constantly for Angel's return with an unstated yearning, and then oversteps his professional responsibility by finding their number and attempting to contact them directly. When they return, and it has become clear that they were raped by their coworker, he is emboldened to intervene more directly before Angel's life unravels completely. He uses his own resources in a series of rash decisions, bringing him out of their professional relationship completely and into his home, and beginning the second and third acts of the story.

It's in this second and third act where the visual design of Clinical Trial really comes into its own. Each scene is an explosion of careful detail, and so much of this detail is rich with meaning. From the wandering looks they subconsciously and consciously give to each other, to the choice of artworks throughout Lee's house, to the position of objects in different rooms - the black duffel bag, Lee's choice of artworks as decoration, the artwork on the fridge after they draw together, the glass-encased taxidermy and the story behind it, his bookcase and its contents, the list goes on - everything and anything works to prepare you for and sell the shocking twist in the third act.

This is made ever more intense through the increased physical and social intimacy that Angel and Lee have throughout their long weekend in the house. Angel gets to ask more of Lee, of his traumatic childhood, and more of his interests. In turn, Angel shares their own, drawing together and talking like they'd known each other for years. Then, when showing their work to each other, Lee had drawn the shrimp he had a special interest in, and Angel had drawn two anthro furries, playfully dodging the direct and obvious interpretation that their drawings depicted them both, inviting Lee and the reader in turn to make differing critical interpretations. (Angel has, as Lee observes, an encyclopedic knowledge of paintings, "labels included." They offer an insight into the history of the paintings on the walls of Lee's home and place of work when they're looked at by player action, and everything they say, Lee responds to with warmth and interest.)

Lee puts Angel's drawing on his fridge, making it clear how much he treasures it.

Their physical intimacy goes from respectful distance, with Angel insisting on the couch as a bed instead of taking Lee's bed, to Angel's feelings of loneliness blooming to the point of crawling into Lee's bed while he's in it, and refusing to let him leave. Fully committed to the medical fetish theme, Angel places their head on his chest to listen to his heartbeat. What is in my opinion the most sensual scene of the game follows here, involving taking a pulse reading from each other while looking softly into each other's eyes. It's sweet and adorable, and so deeply hot that I wanted to climb the walls.

The second act, in the decisions he makes leading up to it, and the twist in the third act, both reveal fully what was implied heavily through Lee's behavior and body language. Lee is a naturally impulsive person, but doesn't seem to know how, or simply can't face what is needed to accept himself and channel it towards better ends. Instead, he reacts towards this aspect of his personality with the restraint and discipline that his traumatizing upbringing instilled into him. He seeks total control over his life, from the scribbled daily schedule in his wallet, his obsessive cleanliness at work and home, and even outwards towards Angel, when he catches and corrects himself over the language of the arm touch. His life is a delicate emotional balance, and he has nobody who can help him maintain or regulate it. Angel represents the void in his life that he has had to cover himself. He yearns in hope that Angel can love him the way he desires so desperately.

At the third act, Angel's life is irreversibly changed upon their discovery of the shrine. With the depths of Lee's obsession revealed, there is no change in his personality to turn him into a mustache-twiddling villain, as many stalker plots might have gone for. His insecurity and jitteriness simply boils over, stuttering out every word in every line as he desperately tries to make verbal amends for his undeniable creepy behavior.

Here, a choice is presented.

In rejecting Lee's obsession, Angel shows what they wanted in someone who could care for them, and how his dominant and controlling personality leaking out was the exact thing they were trying to avoid. They compare it very directly to the selfish and controlling behavior of the coworker who raped them. Discovering Brandon's dead body left them with an uncertain future, one where the rigid plan that Lee lays out would bind their future to someone they could fundamentally never trust.

Lee pressing the drill to his head and blending his brain only made this worse, leaving two dead bodies in the house instead, along with a mountain of evidence linking them both to Angel. (A big thank you to Homie for not pulling away from Lee's death. I am extremely normal about it.) When Angel walks away, they face an uncertain future, and quite possibly the end of their own life.

The threads of the acceptance ending wind all the way to the beginning of the game, and are couched in Lee and Angel's comfort with each other. Lee is able to explain the circumstances better, begging Angel to understand that they had only become entangled in the death of their rapist by chance. He is able to explain it as an act of love, rotted and insane as it is, and in this path, Angel is able to accept.

Over the course of the game, as he and Angel open up to each other, Lee shares more of his past. His abusive implied-Mormon upbringing (confirmed by the author in later discussions online), which he had only escaped a year before the game begins, left him neurotic, controlling of his surroundings and circumstances, hyper-vigilant and impulsive, and as mentioned before, intensely, massively repressed.

The methodically planned murder of Brandon was both an expression of his impulsiveness and disciplined need to control his own life. His love and passion for Angel took over, and it was these emotions that centered him in the decision he took.

In this ending, Angel forgives. They see Lee's loneliness, his yearning to love and to be loved, and they see how this rotted into creepy obsession. They understand the deep, loving passion that motivated him to kill Brandon in cold blood, and they see how two actions that might be identical from the outside mean very different things in application and intention. They forgive the shrine, full of creepshots, used tissues, and the jacket they lost partway through the game, now covered in suspicious crusty white streaks…

And in this ending, after all is forgiven and a murder covered up, they get the loving and peaceful life together they deserve.

It hits an astonishing emotional peak, especially when seen after the rejection ending. Throughout the game, having gotten to know the couple in all their faults and all their perfections, you are left rooting for the best possible future for them both. This review could not hope to cover even a fraction of the detailed and intricate plotting, character writing and themes of this game. I have left out so much here that I could not hope to discuss without a much deeper textual analysis, in very much the same way that the game encourages through its embrace and combination of art history and the social sciences. I could talk about this game for months and years and barely scratch the surface of what has been achieved here.

Clinical Trial is a magnificent piece of art, a beautiful gift to lovers of dark fiction, and I feel privileged to have spent time in a world with Angel and Lee. It is devastating, engrossing, sensual and romantic. It is an envious and towering achievement.

I've missed Homie so much. I'm glad that they are back.

#clinicaltrial #clinicaltrialgame #visual novels #game review

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smutgusher · 8 months ago

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Book Review: Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

In the pull quotes on the covers of most editions of Black Leopard, Red Wolf, much is said and many comparisons drawn to famous authors of science fiction and fantasy, mostly filtered through western conventions. This is underscored by the maps and character lists that adorn each act of the book. What is offered here is a very Black, very pan-African fantasy, something likely totally unfamiliar to the casual western reader. However, as much as this worldbuilding set the scene for the wild, tangled, often contradictory events of the book, I consider the greatest achievement of the author to be the way the story itself was told.

In no way are you guided gently through this book. Much is deliberately held back and left to the imagination - the sex and violence are front and center, driving the events in the words and motivations of the narrator, but he is unreliable and uninterested in telling any kind of story, even taking into account the circumstances in which he is telling his story. Yet he is undeniably good at it, and his narrative grabs you by the throat and forces you to pay attention. Almost every word has meaning, so you could read through three sentences before realizing something was happening you missed the start of, scan back and find it right there in a few short words you might have skimmed right over. This dense and indulgent, yet violently blunt prose can be difficult to take in all at once, but at the same time you as a reader are rewarded heavily every time you pick up the book, with as much pure entertainment as speech and story to digest. It is not a book you can, or should, rush through.

The world itself is as grounded as it is fantastical. The main character explicitly loathes and rejects all of these elements, yet lives in a world in which they undeniably exist. And as pointed out by many of these magical creatures, his hatred of the supernatural has driven him to know far more about it than most would even care to. As much as Tracker vocally rejects the world he was born into, he is still a product of it. He takes on folk knowledge, sayings he hears in bars from drunks, he covers himself in magic, and most fundamentally, he takes on the social mores and rituals and violent masculinity of the people he was born into, despite how much he vocally disclaims it.

The author is forthright, uncompromising, and often indulgent in his approach to the taboo, yet none of it feels cheap. As laden as it is with sex and violence, it is not written as simplistic and disposable shock value to season the dish. Both are as much a driver of events as any other occurrence within the story. They benefit well from being written with undeniable eroticism, and anyone who loves to be confronted with unvarnished sexual deviancy and horror will find much to love here.

Tracker is as much of a victim as a perpetrator, starting from the constant physical molestation he faces in his travels beginning from the land of his birth. His body tells its own story, one of the intentions and desires of others that are frequently pressed onto it, and at its peak is witnessed through a whole chapter dedicated to an expanse of time in which he was kidnapped, tied up and raped nonstop. Leopard has a taste for youthful boys of indeterminate age, and from context it is clear the boys he woos and beds are far from adult. He is cheerfully carefree in the face of Tracker's open disapproval - "boyfucker" is an insult tossed around with great frequency throughout the story. A plethora of characters are not remotely shy to form sexual relationships with children, regardless of societal taboos. There is almost nothing here that doesn't cater to my deep and filthy joys.

Tracker is fundamentally misogynistic. He describes women in wholly derisory terms, and his hatred for witches and brutal blood thirst towards the slightest sign of their existence is not extricable from the way he treats women. He rapes and assaults and kills. Yet he has more emotional connection, and is more forgiving and understanding of men than women. When a trans character briefly passes through his life, he challenges the man to disclaim the assigned-female body he inhabits to his personal satisfaction, and when this is proved to him beyond doubt, comes the closest he ever gets to wishing someone well. (The book has a riotously filthy sense of humor. The last words of the man before he departs is a half-joke about going on a quest to get himself a wooden cock.) In short, Tracker is gay because he hates women.

Yet as aggressively masculine in behavior Tracker is, as deep and stubborn his violent misogyny, in moments of unexamined self-expression, he shows a deep ambivalence about his performed gender. As much as he rejects femininity, he quietly accepts it with his budding sexuality, in his mercurial relationship with traditional rituals of manhood, and his understanding of gender roles shaped by the societies he experienced and was borne from. He talks about his genitalia in both feminine and masculine terms, and grows a comfort and quiet acceptance of his own sexuality by filtering it through a concept of performing the masculine and feminine gender roles in bed. While he never bridges the gap nor finds a way to step outside the perceived duopoly, his ambivalence towards either of the gender roles he knows, and his relentless charge towards individualism, to put himself beyond the rules and desires of others, paints a picture of someone who wishes for something that he feels cannot be given. He cannot seem to even usefully conceive of a non-binary identity, yet that is very much where his mental state lives.

For a while, even he finds a way to settle, and here is where in another sense, he embraces a feminine gender role. Not in the western sense, where the wife stays at home and looks after the kids, but the very opposite of that as seen in the animal kingdom. In a pride of lions or a pack of wolves, where the men stay at home and the women go out to hunt. Though even this does not last for Tracker, and he is pushed towards a showdown against the supernatural forces that have shaped his entire journey from cover to cover.

Tracker’s relationship with the titular Leopard is textually an alliance - I hesitate to say friendship, though elements of that exist, because of the endless antagonism that almost all characters in the book have towards each other - and this alliance is soaked in gay sexuality. They never make sexual contact directly, they have their own lives and loves and relationships and trysts and one night stands in full view of each other, but it is their unspoken love for each other that runs through the story Tracker tells, ending in the last pages with what I consider to be peak romance.

This is a very inspiring book to me. What Marlon James writes, and how he writes, is exactly what I thought unpublishable, unwanted by market forces that sand off all creativity down to a bland, flavorless, broadly-marketable mass. I made the decision some time ago that controversial works of this nature were not worth attempting to publish outside of niche and accepting spheres as the ones I operate in, but this book has me revisiting that position. It is not just a successful book - it is a bestseller that has found an audience, a bestseller with a successful sequel, and it is this sequel that I will be reading next.

#book review #black leopard red wolf #marlon james #books

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