Almost as if it was crafted to pass the Bechdel Test, HTR stars two leading females, albeit one is a block person and the other is a cat, but "casting" like this does make it pretty difficult to not pass the test unless the two only talked about boys the whole time, at which point it would probably be more successful at failing if it completely lacked dialog. In the case of this game, being a dialog driven platformer/adventure game, we see plenty of opportunity to satisfy the criteria. That said, this game goes beyond just passing the test in that it makes a concerted effort to make females equal members of the population of Tin Roof. Doing a quick count of things in my head, I can recall at least 10 major characters (cheating a bit with the 3 blind mice as separate, but I definitely recall them as 3 separate characters) in the game that identified as female. I'm not sure if I can't say the same for male, although if I make assumptions that the default gender is male it's maybe, but definitely not as many major characters.
What's interesting about that population distribution is that you may expect it to affect the story perception. A Noir piece is typically a male dominated genre where the female plays the role of the damsel in destress or at the extreme case, the femme fatale. So the introduction of not one but both of your lead detectives as female, many of the criminals are female, and a good scattering of side characters are also female, is a conscious effort to stray from the norm.
And it is noticeable. Every time a female gender is applied to a character, I found myself pretty much saying "oh, that's a girl?". Guess that might play into my narrative bias that assumes that everyone is defaults to male and is only otherwise if identified as that or they do something that is narratively matching to a female. The other option here is if they appear like a female, but that's the cool part of what this game does with this universe. With the exception of maybe Sally, who appears in a waitress dress and flush cheeks that makes her easier to identify as female, and Shelly for similar reasons, the characters are either block people or animals with gender neutral names (Jones, Franky, Buttons). What's important about this is that it becomes unimportant at a certain point that characters identify one way or another (although there are still some stereotypical male roles played by males here like the corporation CEO, the policy chief, the mob boss). The important part is the character that they are and the role that they play in the story, not the fact that after the character identifies in a certain direction. But does gender neutrality equal gender equality? I'm still not sure.
While this game is interesting in what it's trying to do, I'm not sure if this necessarily changes things as far as normal gender narrative expectations in stories are concerned. Some of that is it's just so ingrained in the way we perceive stories. At the same time I'm trying to imagine if this would have had a different impact if the characters were readily identifiable as female in appearance, and I'm not sure if it would accomplish the same as far as making for an interesting push for thoughts about gender in stories (entails sort of a applying this story to a Sin City visual which is interesting). What I do know is if there is going to be a sequel to this game, I do think that going into it as I meet new characters, I don't feel like I'd necessarily do the same "defaulting to male" that I would normally do for any other story.
