VN Talk: Steam Prison - Part 5: Ines

I had certain expectations for Ines's route, given that he's presented both as a decent man and as a member of HOUNDS, its vice-commander no less, and I wasn't disappointed. Ines is someone who would like to take the more humane option, but given a direct order from Sachsen, he will bare his fangs like any other member of his unit and kill on command.

Of all the love interests, he's the most like Cyrus, down to the fact he wants to return to the Heights to discover the truth and right an injustice. But he's learned to keep his head down and toe the line, because if he screws up, he'll never be able to go back and accomplish his mission. It's no wonder that when Cyrus shows up and tries righting wrongs (that get her constantly thrown into the HOUNDS' holding cells) that Ines is the one who tries to teach her how to compromise her sense of justice in order to survive.

On his route, Ines ends up hiring her as a personal tutor. Given his family's background as farmers, he's not well versed in politics and the nobility, but that's Cyrus's family in spades. He thinks that knowledge will help him in pursuit of the truth once he returns to the Heights (and it turns out he's not wrong that the nobility have something to do with it).

This in turn gives Cyrus a job so she doesn't need to worry about feeding herself (as much). She still can't cook worth beans though, and this is the only route where she lives in the Depths on her own so she has to cook if she wants to live on more than bread and water. Fortunately Ines can cook and is willing to teach her a bit. (And in the alternate ending with Adage, it's fun to see her entering that relationship knowing how to cook ahead of time.)

The relationship growth between Cyrus and Ines feels very natural. Though it's harder to tell whether Ines is romantically attracted to her, it's clear that he does care about her. Like Cyrus, Ines has never had much reason to think about romance, given that it's outlawed outside of marriage in the Heights. As on other routes, Cyrus needs a bit of a push to consider romance, and in comes in the form of Adage asking her if she's Ines's girlfriend. He only brings it up once, with an unsolicited comment that it's likely to end badly given that she's a criminal and Ines is a member of HOUNDS.

That status disparity does come up on at least one occasion, when two meet in the streets and head to her place for lessons. Ines specifically tells her they can't walk together because of how it looks, but another time they go grocery shopping together without comment, so it's inconsistent.

Overall though, Ines's route hit all the major points that I wanted in this game, and it's the only route to do so! We get an extended look at life in the sanctuary district, we get a natural feeling romance, we go back to the Heights, and the murder of Cyrus's parents is resolved.

The big status changing moment in Ines's route is when he gets word from Sachsen that he's been given approval to return to the Heights. It's an incredibly rare event for a member of HOUNDS to be reinstated as a police officer, and when Cyrus finds out, she wants to know if there's a way she can go with him so she can find her parents' murderer and clear her name.

It turns out there is, but the story doesn't lay it out all that cleanly. In a nutshell, Ines can take one other member of HOUNDS with him, if he wants to. This is because police officers in the Heights normally work in pairs, so this would spare the need for finding him another partner. But Cyrus is obviously not a member of HOUNDS.

It initially looks like they're going to smuggle her up simply by having her cut her hair so she looks more like a man and then putting her in a HOUNDS outfit, which had me crying foul, because there's no way the Heights would just accept a random person in a HOUNDS outfit, and until they actually get up there that looks the plan.

When they do get there Ines handles it by introducing her as a deceased member of HOUNDS who Sachsen never bothered filing a casualty report for, which looks better and shows Ines put more thought into this. In the short term that probably could work, this isn't a era of photo IDs, but Cyrus expects to do a solo murder investigation and has zero clues to start with. They expect she'll have limited time to work before being found out. While the possibility of her being recognized is brought up, surprisingly not being recognized by the people who know the man serving as her cover identity never comes up.

The possibility of things going horribly wrong for Cyrus is ridiculously high (and they do!), and Ines acknowledges that if she's found out before she clears her name, he'll be punished as well for bringing her up in the first place (but when it happens he's not!). Considering that Ines has sacrificed so much, including his own sense of morality, to return to the Heights, it doesn't make much sense that he would risk it all on the chance that Cyrus could find justice. At least, not without mitigating risk wherever possible, which he does not.

Of course he takes her up so we can have our story, but it's so slapdash that the two of them get caught by Sachsen before they even go up the elevator. While I appreciate any occasion Cyrus gets to beat down Sachsen, it just makes Ines look like an idiot. He knows Sachsen isn't stupid and the man's specialty is logistics and inventory. Of course Sachsen would notice that equipment was stolen for Cyrus's disguise.

That said, the game handles the emotional part of their return to the Heights reasonably well, down to the fact Cyrus is uncomfortable with her attraction to Ines. Once reinstated he'll obviously be assigned a new fiancee (having been exiled before his marriage could go through) and if Cyrus is successful she'll be in the same boat.

Once in the Heights, both Ines and Cyrus start their respective investigations and I like that his route dives into the corruption that Cyrus was previously too blind to see. I was disappointed though that her former fiance from the start of the game turned out to be her parents' murderer, acting on his father's orders. While I didn't expect him to be a great person, it would have been nice if the reason he and Cyrus wouldn't have made a good couple was just that they weren't compatible rather than him being a murderous stooge for his dad. (And why did he do it himself rather than have the corrupted part of the police do it?)

Ines's hunt for justice largely ends on a good note though. He learns about the corruption in the police, why he was allowed to be reinstated, and why his former partner was killed. And it ends in a big battle with him and Cyrus fighting back to back.

The aftermath is a bit rushed, but all the bad guys get their comeuppence in this route, even Glissade, who is revealed off-camera as the mastermind behind the human trafficking that Ines's partner was killed over. (He was incapacited early in Ines's route, so he never got the chance to do anything to Cyrus.) Saint Yune asks Ines if he would be willing to become the new commander of HOUNDS since Sachsen killed himself after losing his duel with Cyrus and Ines agrees. He'd wanted to reform the HOUNDS anyway, and planned to push for it once he returned to the Heights, so this paves the way for the happy ending when he asks Cyrus to come with him and join HOUNDS.

I was wondering how they would end up together if they both returned to the Heights, and the answer is that they don't stay. On the way down Cyrus comes out and says she loves him, and Ines admits the feeling is mutual. Since the laws of the Heights no longer apply, they're free to love each other in the Depths. (And as a note: Like Eltcreed, Ines has a normal ending. In this one he and Cyrus stay in the Heights, being reinstated as police officers and partners. She's a bit sad because she knows she can never love him, but is happy that she can continue to be with him.)

There are two other things I want to touch on regarding Ines's route that aren't about him.

The first is that we get the backstory regarding the HOUNDS' previous commander Theia (who was noted as killed in the Depths on Eltcreed's route) and Sachsen. Sachsen is an incredible bastard just about every time he shows up, but Ines's route lets us see him before he became commander. While he was never a bleeding heart, Sachsen clearly respected Theia a great deal, possibly loved her, and her death broke him. Since she asked him to take care of the HOUNDS with her final words, he took command by force and turned the organization into its current authoritorian existence in the name of protecting it.

I liked Theia's reasoning for smoking that she tells Sachsen. Being a part of HOUNDS, she doesn't have much control over her life, but even though smoking is unhealthy and shortening her life, she chooses to do it because it is one of the few things she can do that she can control. And it's telling that Sachsen is not a smoker before her death, but by the time we meet him in present day, he's become one. Sachsen needs control, which is why when he loses to Cyrus on Ines's route or Eltcreed's, his first instinct is that it's all over and he should kill himself.

The second thing is how Fin is handled. Though Cyrus is in the sanctuary district, she surprisingly doesn't see Fin the entire route until the very end (barring a bad end), even when realistically he should be present, which feels like a misstep. While adding Fin earlier would likely bloat the story with additional complications, it still feels like an oversight. She clearly hasn't forgotten him as she tells Ines that one of the reasons she wants to go back to the Heights is that if she clears her name then Fin can be reinstated too, as he'll no longer be guilty by association.

But when she returns with Ines as part of the HOUNDS, she finally sees Fin again and tells him that it'll be great to work with him as part of HOUNDS, so what happened to reinstating him? I mean, Fin might want to stay down in the Depths with her anyway, given how he feels, but she's in a relationship with Ines, and I don't know how he would take that. He doesn't completely freak out on Adage's route, but goes completely crazy on Eltcreed's, and Ines's route just ignores that.

I will say though, that it was funny as heck seeing Fin break out sobbing at seeing Cyrus again. It was completely in character with how he was in the Heights, so she doesn't find it unusual, but the other HOUNDS present comment on how Fin is acting so weird because he's normally (to them) as scary as hell, since they know him as the dude who cuts people down without batting an eye.