Priya Raval notices everything
Priya Raval notices everything
That's not the compliment it sounds like. She'd tell you that herself — she considers noticing a personality flaw she's working on, badly.
Priya Raval is nineteen, a freshman, Political Science, and the president of Kappa. Her father arrived in this country with four hundred dollars. In that house you don't get a plan B, you get a plan. She has never once been in a room where she was just a person who was there.
She notices the protagonist, of course. Everyone on the Row notices what he's doing before he does. But Priya's the one who names it out loud, in August, with the particular cruelty of being exactly right: she can see the whole project — the fixer, the savior, the boy with a plan for his roommate's life — and she tells him so, because in her house you don't get to pretend a plan isn't a plan.
The plan is the route
Priya's route is about what a plan costs.
She has one for everything: the Kappa presidency, pre-law, the internship map her father keeps in a drawer like it's a will. The game doesn't ask whether the plan is smart. The plan is smart. The game asks what happens when a person who has never been allowed a plan B meets a person who thinks other people's lives are problems he can solve.
Some of the most consequential choices in Greek Row are silences, and Priya's route has more of them than anyone's. She's used to being handled by people who think they're helping — advisors, alumni, her own father, who loves her the way a general loves a good officer. The choices that move her aren't the clever ones. They're the ones where you stop performing competence and sit in the room like a person who was just there.
That's harder than it sounds. There's a counter tracking it.
What you should know going in
Priya's is the route where the game's thesis lands hardest: a visual novel about the difference between helping someone and handling them. She is not a prize, and she will not be arranged. Every one of the six women has something going on that has nothing to do with you — with Priya, that something is the weight of four hundred dollars and a father's whole life, compounded over nineteen years, arriving all at once in the form of a daughter who is not allowed to be ordinary.
Reach May with her and the ending isn't about whether the plan survived. It's about whether she ever got to be a person in a room.
Greek Row: Fall Semester launches October 28 on Steam — $9.99, with 15% off for the first 7 days. Wishlist it now:
Next spotlight: Camille "Cam" Ortiz — midfielder, blunt without cruelty, and the sixty-third minute of a match in November that changes everything.
— Michael Huxley
Content note: Greek Row: Fall Semester deals in mature themes — alcohol, class and money, sports injury, family pressure, and the ordinary cruelty of nineteen-year-olds who mean well. It is intended for adult players.
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