What games taught me about waiting

I have been playing otome games for most of my life: Code:Realize, Hakuoki, Amnesia, Collar x Malice, Mystic Messenger, Dandelion, and others I keep returning to. Alongside them I read a good deal of manga, manhwa and novels in mystery and suspense. Neither shelf looks like where a conspiracy thriller comes from, and both shaped this book more than I expected when I started writing it.

Here is the specific thing those games taught me, and it is not what people usually assume about the phrase slow burn. A route makes you learn a person slowly. You spend hours with someone before you understand what a particular silence means, or why one gesture is the one that gives them away. And someone you were certain about in the first hour can leave you feeling completely different by the end. The only way to arrive there is the slow way, because a route that let you skip ahead would not be teaching you the person, only telling you facts about them. That is the experience the pacing exists to give you: coming to know someone at the speed that actually feels like knowing them, rather than being handed a summary.

That is a strange thing to bring into a thriller, where withheld information usually works as pressure. A file nobody can open, a name nobody will say, a fact hanging over a scene until it finally drops, and the pleasure in that kind of writing is anticipation turning into dread. Games gave me a completely different relationship to the same tool. Waiting, there, is not a toll paid on the way to the good part. It is the good part, and the games I keep returning to are the ones that understood that and stretched it out rather than rushing past it.

This book runs slow burn across sixty-three chapters, and the patience for that came from somewhere specific. I did not learn to sit on two people not saying the thing from a spy novel, where a held breath is usually a countdown. I learned it from games that let me stay unsure about someone for forty hours and made the staying itself enjoyable. And I learned it from manga and manhwa that know how to let a suspicion sit on the page for volumes before answering it. A thriller taught me what to withhold. A game taught me that withholding it could be the whole pleasure, and not a delay before the pleasure starts.

If you have ever finished one of those games certain you had misjudged somebody in the first hour, that is the feeling I spent sixty-three chapters trying to get onto a page.