The Play's the Thing is a choice-based Interactive Fiction game, written by Jo Graham and Amy Griswold and published by Choice of Games. Play as the newly instated playwright of the Odeon theatre, who's works aim to entertain everyone from the common man to royalty. But soon writing the latest theatrical hit becomes the least of your worries, as city of Medaris (and, more importantly, your productions!) become plagued with an unsettling spate of bad luck, and rumors of shadowy beasts stalking the streets grow more prevalent by the day. With the populace whispering about a curse and their monarch unwilling to admit that anything is wrong, it falls to you to investigate the stange goings on in the city. After all, the show must go on!
The Play's the Thing provides examples of:
- Age-Gap Romance: The protagonist is roughly twenty-two while Nichol is in their fifties, though neither party pay much heed to the gap.
- Agent Mulder: Diar believes in the presence of a curse from the get go, and the protagonist can share this sentiment. While Kit is sceptical at first, as events progress they end up fully believing in the curse as well.
- Agent Scully: Nichol and potentially the protagonist, who are quick to find less supernatural explantions for the strange occurences going on in the city. Though both of them finally wind up believing that something magical is afoot by endgame (even if Nichol does so rather grudgingly).
- All Part of the Show: The troupe are forced to incorporate the various disasters that the curse throws at them into their play's narratives in order to stop them from completely falling apart. At one point the protagonist is forced to go on stage and give a completely impromptu soliloquy about darkness to convince the audience that, yes, all the lights in the theatre going out was completely intended!
- At the Opera Tonight: The game opens with the protagonist attending a production put on at the Odeon. Chapter three follows the hijinks that the protagonist gets up to during their first opening night, while chapter nine climaxes with a play that hopes to either save or doom the city.
- Bookworm: Falathar. The protagonist notes that their quarters look more like a library than the rooms of a noble.
- Betrayal by Offspring: The Raven, in their increasing paranoia, eventually comes to believe that their children (especially Falathar) are plotting against them. They deliberately pit the siblings against each other to reduce the chance of the duo teaming up against them, and immediately condemn Falathar to the dungeons should Falathar show any hint of challenging their authority.
- Calling the Old Man Out: Falathar can call out the Raven for blatantly ignoring that the city is under a curse. The Raven has them thrown in the dungeons for sedition as a response.
- The Chains of Commanding: Liathar, as the heir apparent to the city, is torn between their duties to the crown, the Raven, and their own heart.Liathar: Go back to your playhouse, where everything is as you want it to be. Leave the city's politics to those of us who have to bear that burden.
- Curse: Salar has placed The Raven under a misfortune curse as revenge for The Raven's murder of their mother. As the curse grows in strength it eventually starts to leech out and affect the city as a whole.
- Curse Escape Clause: The curse, being brought against the Raven due to their dishonorable murder of Queen Idris of Pomona, has several
- The ruler of Medaris publically admitting the crimes committed against the Queen, and honoring their memory.
- A child of Queen Idris forgiving the ruler of Medaris for their crimes.
- Restoring Pomona to its rightful ruling family.
- Dance of Romance: The protagonist can have one with Falathar at the Raven's mid-winter ball, which can culminate in a Big Damn Kiss.
- Deceptive Legacy: A protagonist who has the illegitimate noble scion background grows up thinking that their missing father was part of the gentry. It later turns out that, while they are noble, it's due to the fact that their real mother was the Queen of Pomona.
- Distinguishing Mark: A quirk which ran in the bloodline of the Royal Family of Pomona was the presence of a thumb shaped birthmark. If the protagonist discovers that Salar has the same birthmark as them, they quickly realise that not only is Salar their sibling, but that they themselves are Queen Idris of Pomona's second child.
- Doom Magnet: What the curse has turned The Raven into, which translates into the entire city being plagued with misfortune.
- Fisher King: Discussed. Putting a curse on something as abstract as a city is impossible, as curses need a blood link between caster and victim to take. However, a curse on a person tends to leech out and affect those surrounding them, and a ruler and their city are very closely intertwined. Therefore a a curse placed on a monarch could feasible leak out and start to affect the city they preside over.
- Falling Chandelier of Doom: Ezren can die by being crushed by a falling chandelier.
- Great Escape: The protagonist can potentially break themselves or Falathar out of the Raven's dungeons.
- He Knows Too Much: The Raven schemes to have Ezren assassinated to stop the latter from revealing what they know about the curse and the Raven's past crimes.
- Heroic Bastard: The protagonist, if they're the illegitimate child of a courtesan and an unknown nobleman. Then subverted when it's revealed that they're the trueborn child of the Queen of Pomona.
- I Kiss Your Hand: All over the place if the protagonist pursues Falathar. It's the capstone of a protagonist's romantic proposal to them, too.
- Like Father, Unlike Son: The quiet and bookish Falathar, with their more pacifistic tendencies, is nothing like the formidable former Young Conqueror Raven. It's highly implied that the distaste the Raven has for them is because they view Falathar as a softhearted coward.
- Lost Orphaned Royalty: The protagonist, if they come from the orphan background.
- Long-Lost Relative: Salar is the protagonist's long lost twin sibling.
- The Lost Lenore: Nichol lost a lover decades ago after the Raven violently put down revolutionary student protests. Falathar may end up as this for the protagonst, if they're killed during the riots which break out at the Raven's mid-winter address.
- Making Love in All the Wrong Places: The game's final romance scene happens in the prop room of the Odeon. All the love interests have something to say about this, which prompts the protagonist to assure them that they can barricade the door to avoid scandalizing the others.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: While there is a pervasive rumor that the city is under a cause, a good part of the populance believe that the sudden spate of bad luck that's going around the city is solely the fault of unfortunate circumstances and random chance. The ruling house is also divided on this subject: The Raven is insistent that, if anything, it's enemies of the state who are causing the misfortunes, while Falathar is convinced that the curse idea has merit. Both of them turn out to technically be correct.
- Marry for Love: Liathar is determined to marry their true love Pell and has so far refused a marriage of state, putting them at odds with the Raven.
- Falathar also wants to marry for love. If the protagonist suggests that Falathar marries them in order to break the curse and save the city, they'll decline if relationship is too low or the protagonist hasn't courted them enough.
- Modest Royalty: Falathar, who prefers to wear simple scholar robes. The protagonist muses that they'd easily mistake Falathar for a university student if they didn't know better.
- Nerds Are Sexy: The protagonist expresses this sentiment if they're attracted to Falathar.
- Noble Fugitive: Falathar, who's forced to lay low in the Odeon if the protagonist successfully breaks them out of the palace dungeons after they're thrown in there by the Raven. They can potentially never lose this status if the protagonist convinces them to flee Medaris alongside the Odeon troupe.
- Oblivious Adoption: Salar, before their parents broke the news to them. A protagonist who's believed to be the illegitimate child of a noble is blissfully unaware that their mother is not actually their birth mother.
- Occult Detective: Kit eventually falls into this role, providing the protagonist with a lot of useful information about the curse, up to and including how to break it.
- Parental Marriage Veto: The Raven has forbidden Liathar from marrying their longtime love Pell, partly because Pell is a commoner, but mostly because the union won't produce an heir of Liathar's own body.
- Princeling Rivalry: Falathar and Liathar's relationship has gotten rather strained as of late. The protagonist can discover that The Raven has been deliberately setting them against each other from the shadows, in order to prevent them from figuring out that the curse on the city was due to the Raven's own misdeeds.
- Rags to Royalty:
- Cinderella style if the protagonist manages to marry Falathar.
- Goose Girl style: Salar can reclaim their birthright of Pomona, if the protagonist convices the current ruler of Medaris to restore the city back to it's former royal family.
- Really Royalty Reveal: Salar and the protagonist are the children of the former Queen of Pomona. Salar learns this shortly before the events of the game and subsequently calls a curse down on the royal family of Mendaris to punish the Raven for their role in the Queen's death.
- Riches to Rags: May happen to Falathar, if the city falls to the curse, or if the protagonist convinces them to flee the city alongside the Odeon company.
- The Scottish Trope: If the protagonist dies on stage, then the play made about their life eventually becomes the setting's equivalent of Macbeth, complete with thespians fervently believing that saying its name will bring the wrath of the theatre ghosts down upon you.
- Separated at Birth: Salar and the protagonist, the twin children of Queen Idris of Pomona who were seperated after the Raven murdered their mother.
- Siblings Share the Throne: If Liathar and Falathar repair their relationship, they can potentially end up jointly ruling Medaris.
- Shamed by a Mob: If the curse on the city is strong enough, the populace will blame the Raven for it and will potentially riot against them during their annual public address.
- If the protagonist exposes the Raven's crime of killing Queen Idris during The Fall of Atlantis, then the angry crowd can brand them a murderer and run them out of the city.
- The Show Must Go On: Because if it doesn't, then the troupe (and more importantly, the protagonist) would starve. Eventually, the stakes increase to the point where the show must go on if the city wants any chance of being freed from its curse.
- The protagonist can quote this word for word before they march on stage to deliver an improvised soliloquy to try to salvage their play's final act.
- The Show Must Go Wrong: How the effects of the city's curse are felt in the Odeon, with the cast and crew being beset by every production problem under the sun. The one time the troupe puts on a performance outside city limits, the whole thing goes wonderfully smoothly.
- Starving Artist: The protagonist at the start of the game, with the more practical minded ones coverting a future job at the Odeon purely for the promise of a steady paycheck.
- Strong Family Resemblance: Both Cenone's heirs take after them. The protagonist and Salar strongly favor their mother, to the point where Ezren is immediately able to identify the protagonist as Queen Idris's child.
- There Is Another: Two potential avenues to break the curse involve the ruler of Medaris being publicly forgiven by the child of Queen Idris for their transgressions or the child marrying into the royal family, as they'll regain rule over their ancestral lands. Unfortunately, since said child is the very vengeful Salar, it looks like none of these options are feasible...until it's revealed that the protagonist is the second child of Queen Idris, who can fufill any of the clauses in Salar's place.
- Torches and Pitchforks: If the curse has enough power, the disgruntled crowd attending the Raven's annual mid-winter address whip themselves up into a violent frenzy. They can easily kill any one of the Royal family in their rage.
- The Un Favourite: Falathar is the Raven's least favourite child, with Cenone looking down on them due to their gentle nature and scholarly leanings.
- Wicked Cultured: Averted with The Raven. They don't particularly care for either literature or the fine arts, and they only attend the theatre because their heirs pretty much force them to.
- Youngest Child Wins: The player will need to jump through several hoops to do so, but it's possible for Falathar to both marry the protagonist and claim Cenone's crown.
- Young Conqueror: The Raven came to the throne on the back of their success of conquering the neighbouring city of Pomona some twenty years prior.
