Vacant Arcadia [Reposting An Unhinged 2022 Review]

 

[This is reposted from a review/live blog in 2022.]

I found my new favorite underrated indie musical audio drama.

Did you like Ready Player One/Dramatical Murder/Augmented Reality games? Did you like Sayer, WOE.BEGONE, Penumbra Podcast’s Juno Steel, Dreambound, and Fall of the House of Sunshine? Do you like amazingly skilled Broadway-level vocalists? And do you want... clear anime references?

Well check out Vacant Arcadia, released in 2021. It’s set in a cyberpunk post apocalyptic future in your classic dystopian rich & poor divided city, where body mods/replacements and Artificial Intelligence are a thing. There’s an illegal AR game that 5 people and 1 game master are plopped into in hopes to escape the city and reborn into better bodies.

That’s as far as I’ll go into the pre-spoiler section, but know that there’s some amazing themes around human condition, [non-generative] AI stuff, body and gender stuff, sex work, drugs stuff, and politics. As a participant in another murder game podcast oneshot episode (Hubris “(Don’t) Escape”), there’s some writing choices in the “deadly reality game” genre that I think only queer creators would make. I mean where else would you get a Sayer from Sayer singing a gayer Wicked-esque love ballad with computer programming euphemisms to an otaku Ty Betteridge from Woe.begone?

The musical pieces are not what I would normally lean towards (I usually like rock or pop). Most of Vacant Arcadia is ballads, jazz, typical Broadway, and a few Studio Ghibli-esque songs. There’s songs reminiscent of Cabaret, Chicago, Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables, Cats, West Side Story, A Chorus Line, and more. The cast/vocalists were so skilled that I didn’t mind at all and this isn’t a genre you’d expect to go along with a dystopian cyberbunk AR game-themed story, but somehow it works.

I will give a big warning that if you listen from Spotify on your phone speakers, the audio during songs is quite poor and not in the Sheridan Tapes/Magnus Archives “old cassette tape” kind of poor quality. If you can get your hands on good non-phone speakers/headphones or listen with a different platform like Podbean, that may be a much better listening experience. Also to be transparent, you can binge it completely without interruption- there are no ads, no intro/outro/credits, etc.

So please please check it out and yell at me about it. I have no idea what happened to the show or its creators and there’s ZERO fan posts about it on social media.

WARNING MAJOR SPOILERS. 

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FUCKIN HELL MAN. These are my fresh thoughts as I just finished the final episode. I’m listening to the entire soundtrack link here and honestly if the my phone’s speakers were better quality, it would be STUNNING AMAZING PERFECT cause the skill of these vocalists? Those riffs? The harmonizations? The high notes? My god.

Ok so calling it a murder game is not quite right in that they’re not *supposed* to kill each other like other murder games are. But it’s heavily implied that the game is designed to fail/kill everyone sooo. Also the Sayer comparison isn’t right either because the AI in question is too submissive/obedient and is more like Jet from Under the Electric Stars.

So the show follows Machie (hikikomori hacker who creates the show’s Augmented Reality game), Max (a former teen genius turned dropout drug addict), Lil Tipsy (a trans sex worker who needs a new body to transition), Dr Lawrence (an aging morgue doctor whose body is also deteriorating from illness), Edward (a married businessman whose actually a spy that is Machie’s childhood friend), and Marx (a “cult escapee”). There’s also the city’s AI system “Rez”.

The game is an Augmented Reality overlaid on the city into a “fairy land” based off an anime that Machie is obsessed with. It starts out about solving riddles and looking for puzzles to find their way to a room that’s supposed to have the bodies. They would need to work together as a team to overcome Machie, but also compete against each other when they can’t trust each other. Things quickly go down, secrets are revealed, people sing about trauma, lives are threatened, and there’s the constant threat of a solar flare radiation warning.

As a side note, I think all the foreshadowing works really well. The characters are smart, flawed but not too annoying, and well-rounded with depths that are both expected and surprising. And as I mentioned, the voice actors are amazing singers that all harmonize together well, although some of the conversations and songs drag on a little too long. In these type of stories, sometimes the plots and subplots try to overcompensate... but thankfully there’s not so much going on that it gets convoluted.

Onto the queer stuff!

There’s a very interesting discussion about body replacements/mods/grafts and gender and I absolutely *love* the fact that the cisgender businessman is the character whose aware of his job privilege, and that the old man doctor has female & male body parts grafted onto him and agrees with the trans character on gender fuckery. In the same convo, Marx reveals that *they’re* one of the bodies that people upload into. 

This eventually leads to an overarching theme about bodies, body ownership, the human condition, and what counts as humanity, especially once Marx and Rez are taken into consideration. This is a classic scifi question and I like how Vacant Arcadia tackled it without forcing a lesson down our throats.

Also Tipsy teaches Marx about consent & sex positivity, Tipsy fucks Edward, and Tipsy offers to have sex with Max. A+++. Also also Machie hacks into Rez to create the AR game, and they have 3 duets filled with smexy computer programming innuendos that start out about hacking only to end with them calling each other “love” and “darling” and then that ending happens.

Anyways, so having helped create a queer murder game podcast episode myself and listening to Dining in the Void, there’s something i notice when comparing to Battle Royale/Squid Games/Saw, other murder games. We’re more likely to create an alternate ending where everyone survives, but I’m not sure Vacant Arcadia qualifies as a happy ending even though it’s “optimistic”...ish.

Now about that ending...

So they wind up in the Upper City only to realize that it’s actually an abandoned tourist attraction. Stuff happens with the Worm and the roles those 5 are. My favorite tear-jearker trope happens- Marx realizes that they’re the body everyone is going after to be uploaded/reborn into & thus needs to sacrifice themself. More stuff happens, including a MacGuffen biochip. Then it turns out that the solar flare radiation is actually gonna kill everyone and sure enough it does, including our main cast. This would have been a good stop in my opinion. However Vacant Arcadia decided that in Machie & Rez’s final duet, they combined into 1 entity and revive the main cast into new Founder bodies that are tasked with revolutionizing the city... full of dead people and radiation. 

Which is also a decent stop, but an ending that most deadly game storylines would not do. So it’s a rather bittersweet ending.

My final opinion: there’s definitely some things it could improve on, the music isn’t my personal taste although I think a lot of musical or jazz fans would like it.  I loved the characters, was very impressed with the voice actors, the plot was pretty good, it was never confusing or convoluted, and I really did like all the themes it addressed.

Do I think it needs a sequel or a season 2? I dont think so- i think it stops at a good place. However, I do wish there could be some minisodes, spinoffs, or prequels. Or most ambitious of all, concerts/live shows. A TV or Visual novel adaptation would also be so cool.