Crimson Rain

Crimson Rain is an experimental and stylized noir-detective style puzzle narrative game, where every character in the scene is mute, lacks facial expressions, looks identical, and is entirely ambiguous in terms of race, gender identity, class, sexuality, and any other distinguishing features. This is a means to address the rampant stereotyping and aesthetic bias that is rooted in classic detective fiction, as well as the motivated reasoning that is at the root of the perpetuation of hatred and bigotry. By attempting to create an environment for players where that form of internal/motivated bias is impossible, the player has no room for motivated reasoning, and instead has to extract their own truth from a blank canvas. Players are tasked to deduce the game’s narrative solely through the characters’ actions, through the manipulation of time on individual characters’ timelines of events. To solve the game,  players must observe every characters’ timeline, and place them all in chronological order through thoughtful analysis and observation, with the goal of uncovering, and subsequently erasing, the tragedy that occurred amongst the events they witnessed.