Two of the themes in the play itself include the assertive sexuality displayed by Salome and the power of the gaze to spell one's doom. Where they intersect is where this game plays.

The first section is a waiting game, where you can read lines from the play itself, with a heavy grain filter. Jokanaan finds it difficult to look at Salome, and speaks ill of her quite often. She even states that if he had but ever looked on her, he would have loved her, and the whole ordeal could have been different. You are forbidden to view her, except through glimpses of the grate above you. Instead, invectives against her flash on your screen and are scrawled on the walls.

Then you die, as the story foretells, as you have prophesied, as the walls foreshadow by telling you about the black wings of death beating while the rhythm of the drum above continues.

The next part of the game is about exploration. Acting as a disembodied spirit, you extinguish the lights. From this, I can only gather that you are once again Jokanaan seeking to extinguish the ability to see Salome herself, hanging over the balcony, with your head on a silver shield next to her, a candle, and a cut open pomegranate seeming to symbolize both the Judaic tradition of righteousness and a parallel of another bleeding wound to create balance on Salome's other side.

Very purposeful anachronisms litter this chapter: Salome listens to an iPod and has the tell-tale earbuds hanging alongside her necklace, there exists a guitar and amplifier near the other instruments. The sound and music, no matter how well reproduced will still be delivered to you electronically, and the game seems to cue us into this fact by reminding us that we are in a created space, with created music--a bit of Brecht's verfremdungseffekt, if you will. Remind people that they are not actually involved in this time period. We are supposed to think on why this exists, therefore we are reminded not to be too drawn in to the events.

After extinguishing all the lights, you are foiled as the sun rises. The game ends. You restart to see the epilogue (as the readme.txt tells you to do), where Salome dances in bright sunlight. The game does not end in Herod calling for Salome's death, but seems to hearken back to Salome's second to last monologue:

Ah! Ah! wherefore didst thou not look at me, Jokanaan? If thou hadst looked at me thou hadst loved me. Well I know that thou wouldst have loved me, and the mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death. Love only one should consider.

(Emphasis mine.)

Salome is never an actor whom we see asserting any direct influence, but is constantly the center of our attention. She is the only other moving figure in the first chapter until we are executed, the point to which we are drawn again and again in the second (though we are also given glimpses of her mother Herodias and the executioner), and the only point of real focus in the epilogue.

You are exploring Salome the play and the person, you are seeing her, and this game's primary experimentation seems to be in drawing your eye and making you aware of this fact. Through exploration you will find the skull ring Herod gives the executioner to enact his will. There will be Herodias, watching from stage right. These all tell of the story that happened, the story that you, Jokanaan, never actually experienced (but you, the reader, the watcher, may know through the irony of not being Jokanaan). Then? A matchbook with Salome's phone number.

It is the last that illustrates that this is about Salome having wanted to explore her sexuality and being spurned. She dances in the beginning and you ignore her, but she still catches your attention, and whether or not you reload the game after the lights extinguish and the sun comes up determines if you see her blossoming and dancing for you, or if you continue to spurn her advances. In almost direct reversal of Laura Mulvey's interpretation of the gaze, you are indeed in the position of a masculine spectator, but the object of desire is the cause of your death because you denied her your gaze.

It is also at this point in the game where you can no longer interact, where the only acting agent in Salome, who has previously only been seen in fleeting glimpses and as stationary. You are relinquished of your control, and she is finally come to life. She has truly become a femme fatale.