I don’t play many visual novels, but I’ve played enough to know that Of The Devil is hot. Hot like the sizzle of rain through a neon signboard as a dull-eyed redhead walks into a cyberpunk police station at 3am and starts throwing around Chandlerisms like she’s boiling an egg – and you’re the egg. “Information’s like cash in my line of work,” says the dame, who is a freelance lawyer called Morgan. “You’ve got to spend it to make it.” She sizes up the holographic front desk, with its sprinkling of things to OBSERVE. “Let’s see if I can’t poke around and shake some change loose.”
If you hate purpulp detective fiction you may have already clicked away, in which case: up yours, Jerky McJerkface, I never liked you anyway. If you’re still here, you may be relieved to learn that Of The Devil is capable of taking the piss out of itself, though this is far from parody. For example, one of the first objects you can OBSERVE is a datapad containing a corporate press release which Morgan – whose opening narration muses upon a “slight blunting of the night’s ambience, emphasis on the slight” – dismisses as “flowery”. One of the first things you can have her do is forget her own date of birth.
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The more indulgent noir flourishes also dissipate as you push on with Morgan’s task, which is to defend a guy who has seemingly been caught bang to rights for murdering his girlfriend. You interview a couple of classically mismatched detectives – a lanky whimsical oldster and a snarling young gun with an eyepatch. You use your phone’s AR functionality to comb a hot pink projection of the crime scene. The near-future setting takes shape in a glittery wash of allusions to experimental androids and surveillance and unjust laws. The dialogue becomes almost steely.
As you talk and probe and deduce, filling out your phone’s casefiles, you earn casino chips which you’ll eventually play in interrogation sequences that resemble high-octane collectible card games. Yes, that line about information being a currency was a tutorial, actually.
Even when the writing is laying it on thick, Of The Devil gets away with it because the visuals and audio are a blast. The presentation recalls Danganronpa: fixed-perspective 3D environments, 2D character art and a very dishy interface, with a music player pulsing away in top right. The characters are rakish, crazy-eyed confections with an efficient spread of expressions and changes of posture. While there’s no voice-acting, they each get their own pitch of digital typewriter noise during dialogue, which is one of those well-worn, conceptually simple tricks that never fails to delight me.
Find Of The Devil on Steam. I played the first free prologue chapter this morning for an hour and it really feels like a goer – as cool as the moon reflecting from an android’s bum through the smoke from a cigarette kindled on the wrong side of a one-way-street.
It’s a pay-per-episode format, with one paid episode available so far. To repeat a cry oftenheard around these parts of late, I don’t know if we have the resources to review it, but I intend to play more. Thanks very much to freelance scribe Autumn Wright for spotting the game and boosting it on Bluesky.
