Misericorde review: And then there were nun

For all the time I spent in them as a kid, churches always did scare me a little.

The first time I ever reckoned with my own mortality was in a place of worship. I’ll never forget sitting in my cousin’s lap when the pastor’s words fell on me like a piano, Looney Tunes-style.

I was three or four and probably inconsolable. No, it didn’t help that everyone else would die too. Why would that make me feel better?

Religion and death go hand in hand, of course, which makes an English 15th-century convent a particularly compelling setting for a murder mystery.

Misericorde’s world seems to be composed of heavily stylized black-and-white stock images. The resulting atmosphere is as oppressive as any screenshot might imply.

Misericorde: Volume One, a visual novel written, composed and drawn by XeeCee (triple-double, no assist), immediately one-ups its setting with a delicious premise. One of the sisters at Linbarrow Abbey has been murdered. Everyone is a suspect, except for Hedwig, who has spent the last two decades of her life locked in a cell as the monastery’s anchoress. As Pentiment players can attest, anchoresses are no work of fiction; these women were quite real, and served as living encyclopedias and the ultimate interpreters of the word of God.  You could not possibly imagine someone more about that life than an anchoress.

“Live by the sword, die by the sword.”

Because of her circumstance, Hedwig becomes the only resident of the monastery with an alibi, and thus is unwillingly thrust into the role of lead investigator by Mother Superior. Her charge: to find out, and not be found out. But as anyone who has ever seen Oldboy might imagine, being locked in the same room for several decades is not particularly conducive to social situations.

For what it’s worth, Hedwig is hardly alone among the socially inept at Linbarrow Abbey.

The hagioscope is constructed in such a way that neither person can see who they’re talking to. This means Hedwig has never seen another nun despite her decades-long stay at Linbarrow Abbey.

There’s one more wrinkle here. Hedwig is not “you” in this story. “You” are an anonymous person on the other side of the hagioscope, a tiny hole in the wall, outside of Hedwig’s cell, to whom she is recounting this tale from one year ago.  It’s a small but meaningful distinction. Hedwig occasionally speaks to you directly during story time, at which point it becomes clear that she has been utterly changed by this experience. Past Hedwig is milquetoast, easily trod-upon and a textbook fish out of water for whom the very concept of stairs proves a challenging early boss on her first day. Present-day Hedwig, on the other hand, is indignant, disillusioned and just a little bit scary. Charting her growth (or regression, depending upon your perspective) as the story unfolds is one of many factors propelling this mystery along.

Another is the ever-evolving portrait of the victim at the center of it all. Though she is defined almost entirely through her off-screen interactions with the supporting cast, she is afforded a depth and complexity in death that few video game characters are given even in life.

The Unusual Suspects™

Truthfully, every character in Misericorde shines. There is no voice acting, which is a little more of a blessing than a curse given the length of this volume. I’d much rather button through text at my own speed rather than wait to hear voice lines. Steam says that I’ve clocked in around 14 hours, but some of that idling time was spent looking up Latin translations of scripture or other historic references to England circa 1472.

I know what Darcy’s voice sounds like, anyway. Darcy is one of the many sisters that Hedwig befriends during her investigation (and my personal favorite). She’s a little out there. You might even say she is perpetually on one. She speaks how my younger cousins text, which is to say there’s no punctuation or capitalization at all. That’s not a character flaw—Darcy has no flaws. It’s just a remarkably illustrative detail.

You don’t need this caption. You know which one Darcy is.

Speaking of flaws, God does Hedwig make for a great lead. Armed with scripture as her only reference to… well, anything, and Matt-Murdock levels of self-destructive Catholic guilt, her fanatical worldview is constantly under siege from her less-than-devout sisters. And as that worldview develops and reveals a convent full of “difficult” women that society has neglected or cast aside for some reason or another (all of them bad), Misericorde’s themes take centerstage.

It’s not hard to see how Hedwig became this way, but it’s still heartbreaking.

Misericorde: Volume One is a kinetic novel, a subcategory of visual novel in which the player does not directly interact with the story. There are no dialogue options, branching paths or multiple endings. Technically, there’s not even a single ending (yet). Though many opportunities present themselves throughout the story to squeeze in a minigame or two—a chess minigame when Mother Superior teaches you how to play, a rhythm minigame during a musical performance, etc.—I’m impressed by Misericorde’s restraint. The lack of agency presented in so many characters’ personal stories seems like a neat parallel to the nature of a kinetic novel more than a deliberate echo, but it works all the same.

Equally effective is the soundtrack, which sounds at times like the most church-organ-centric cuts from a Portishead album (I’m thinking of something like “Numb” in particular). Just try to tell me that Shepherd’s Crook doesn’t sound like an anachronistic trip-hop stroll through a neglected abbey.

Misericorde: Volume One ends more like a Halo 2 than a Mass Effect 2, which is an overwrought way to say that the ending is fairly abrupt. But a numbered entry in a series doesn’t have to tell a complete story to be a compelling experience in its own right.

Calls to action aren’t really my thing, but for the love of God, go buy Misericorde: Volume One. It’s $9. I’ve been suppressing a rant about binge culture the whole time I’ve been writing this, because I know some of you would rather wait until the story is complete. There’s no wrong way to play video games, but I think avoiding the discussion between volumes would be an enormous missed opportunity for anyone interested in this game.

I found a fairly substantial secret just now while writing this, hours after I thought I was done, and I’m losing my mind over it. All I want to do is go to a message board to discuss this game with someone, but half of y’all are on your seventh playthrough of Resident Evil 4 and the other half are in cryostasis until May 12. So yes, this review is less of a public service announcement than a desperate plea fueled purely by self-interest.

If not for me, do it for Darcy.