Indie Side — Queer Love in Dystopia
By now, most of you reading this probably know that the gaming industry seriously lacks queer representation. In the rare instances we do get it, it’s optional — something tangential that can easily be avoided in the main story. This is especially true among Triple A titles, where there’s just way too much disappointment.
Indie games are changing this, however. I’ve covered a fair few queer games during this blog’s run, each of them incredibly interesting with how they play with queer dynamics and relationships. Hybrid Rainbow is no exception.
Developed by TangledVirus (they/them), the game follows its main character, a trans woman named Aparecida, as she navigates a dystopic version of Rio de Janeiro from the near future. AI, mysterious infections, and queer love with her girlfriend, Yara, are key themes of this game.
It’s short — it took me under an hour to access both endings. But nevertheless, it was a fun experience, and one that left me feeling surprisingly warm and fuzzy after all was said and done. If you’re looking for a unique queer visual novel, this is worth a look.
I had the pleasure of sitting down with TangledVirus and talking with them about the development and themes of the game. Beware for spoilers!
What inspired the visual novel direction of the game?
First of all, I love visual novels. I just think that they are really neat and since I started making games I’ve been making visual novels simply because of that. I also think as a solo dev that is still learning a lot of game dev related things — coding, 3D modeling, how to create gameplay mechanics and things like that — the ease I have with making visual novels motivates me to make them and keep going.
It also happens that the one game that made me consider game dev at first is a visual novel — it’s Va-11 Hall-a — and it’s been a long road since then but it’s still the sort of game I look at and I go “DAMN that’s a good video game.” That’s why Hybrid Rainbow and my other games are visual novels.
A heavy theme throughout Hybrid Rainbow is the institutionalized queerphobia, emphasized both by the government, media, and broader culture. Since the game is based in a dystopic future, how likely do you think this sort of reality is?
I based that on how Brazil is going. Jair Bolsonaro and his minions were still in power here and every day things looked bleaker, so while I was writing Hybrid Rainbow I wanted to do the cyberpunk thing of “Take the present AND MAKE IT WORSE!” as a way to do a critique of it. That then got painted with a lot of the culture of the estate of Rio de Janeiro and the city of Rio de Janeiro.
If you know something about Rio, it is either Christ the Redeemer (the big statue of Jesus doing a T pose) and Carnaval. Most people know it from Carnaval. But that leads people to be a tad impressed when they come here and realize that this city and estate both are full of religious freaks that hate queer people, that love the US and want them to take over, some want the military dictatorship back and there’s those that want the police to kill more people.
Brazil is becoming worse, or maybe it was already bad and it’s getting even worse. Still, that whole thing and that feeling of hopelessness and the fact that 2022 was shit year for me personally made me write Hybrid Rainbow like that.
So, how likely do I think we are going to see a future Brazil like the one in Hybrid Rainbow? If you asked me that last year, 2023 with Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva back in power promising to bring the good ol’ days of his two terms as president back I would say “Nah, just nah. Things will be okay.” but now… After seeing that Lula is now just another Neo-Liberal liar and that things are just getting bad in a new way I will say that with each passing day we are closer to a future like the one Hybrid Rainbow.
Brazil as a failed estate, militarizing itself to hell, with queer rights becoming non-existent. We could’ve been the greatest place to live.
The theme of trying to find where to live as a marginalized person in a society hell bent against you makes up a core element of the plot. Was this based on the broader experiences of people fleeing more bigoted areas?
No. It wasn’t related to that.
I had a lot of drafts of what I wanted the ending of the game to be and the main plot. Some would be just more of Yara and Aparecida trying to manage their day, some were about them seeing what happened to their store(the cops stole everything), some were just silly.
I decided for an ending where they leave the city of Rio de Janeiro because they wanted to find a place not where they would be accepted (in my head wherever they went to wouldn’t be great about that) but more a place where the police wouldn’t just show up and shoot a ton of people.
My original draft for that ending was even darker with them considering moving again because someone found out about them being together and firebombed their place. I chose to do something hopeful.
What were the themes differentiating the two endings?
“Waiting. VS Going for it!”
In one ending they made the decision to get their things ready and leave as soon as they could, that’s a harsh and on the moment thing. It’s a very hasty decision. It could’ve gone bad in many ways, it almost did but then they ended up in a good place by the ocean — the green coast of Rio de Janeiro.
While on the other hand, waiting for it made them go to the mountains of Rio de Janeiro and ended up with Yara and Aparecida separated for some time. My idea for the endings is that they both had a good and a bad side to them, some will prefer one, some will prefer another.
What other projects are you working on that you’d like to highlight?
Right now I’m making like five different visual novels at the same time, three of them are set in the same universe as Hybrid Rainbow all set in Rio de Janeiro! In one of them Yara and Aparecida appear and they are even more lovey dovey, that one also goes about crime and racism in Brazil.
The other two are sequels of short to another game of mine called Pillow Talk, and that game is set around the same time as Hybrid Rainbow. I’m getting money to get a musician to do music for those games.
Everything I’m working on right now is either cyberpunk or sci-fi. And right now I’m making a sale of my games — Hybrid Rainbow and Pillow Talk included so I can help fund these games. That’s what I’m working on right now.
