DEVIL'S LIMINAL

I suppose I’ve played a fair number of visual novels, in an objective sense – each year sees at least a couple entered in the various annual comps and events, so even though I haven’t played any of the big, longform names, I’ve got at least a fair bit of exposure. But it’s definitely an area where I feel myself on unsure footing, and so when I find myself wishing DEVIL’S LIMINAL weren’t quite so slow-paced, I wonder whether I’m critiquing the game or the format. Like, it’s definitely the case that it takes its time to get going: this is a supernatural mystery, but the first hour of the 1.5 hour demo version is content to slowly establish the main character, a teenager spending one last summer at home in small-town Arizona before heading off to college, and her milieu, with only the slightest hints of plot. And while there are a few choices, they’re not especially engaging, largely amount to either picking lines of dialogue that all have to be exhausted to progress, or answering simple “do you want plot or not?” questions when a friend calls to ask you to hang out.

In a book or a traditional piece of IF, where you could read all the dialogue in its short scenes in one or two passages, I think that would work fine, and I actually might admire the commitment to sitting with the characters before the mystical shenanigans started. But in VN format, the need to click through each individual line of dialogue was generally enervating. Fortunately, I’ve played enough VNs to know the RenPy trick where you can just click a bunch to get through the timed text, and then scroll through it much faster the second time using the mouse wheel, which made things more bearable, but I’m still worried that my concerns about pacing are an artifact of my unfamiliarity with VN conventions.

Even leaving that big question aside, there’s both a lot to enjoy and a lot to critique with DEVIL’S LIMINAL, though I come down more on the former side than the latter. Just to get the rest of the VN-specific conversation out of the way first, I’ll note that the visuals are very well done. Just about every character has an expressive, lightly-animated drawing representing them, with the exceptions (largely your mother, who is never directly depicted) pretty clearly intentional. The backgrounds, meanwhile, look to be photos fed through an early-Macintosh filter, evocative in black-and-white dithering. I often find the fact that 2/3 of the screen in a VN is mostly static kind of annoying, but DEVIL’S LIMINAL makes good use of the real estate, frequently shifting locations or bringing character icons on or off screen, with visuals that largely complemented the text.

That’s helpful because sometimes the text withholds a bit more than I think it should. For all that the game takes its time introducing Margo (the main character), her family, her work situation, her friends (including some new ones), and her backstory, it doesn’t provide context for much of what’s happening, allowing interactions to play out without always letting the player know about the dynamics beneath the surface. Sometimes that’s a reasonable choice – there’s clearly some Big Deal with Margo’s dad, and the game seems to be building up to a set of reveals that I suspect will land pretty well – but I was annoyed that it took two long scenes of interacting with Lee, the first of which seemed pretty innocuous, to learn that he was Margo’s dirtbag ex. And there’s a scene about an hour in, right when supernatural stuff starts getting weird, that talks about how she’s always yearned to be special, some kind of chosen one, and live in a world of demons and monsters, which feels like important characterization that’s just nowhere in play before that moment, aside from a couple glancing comments like saying that if she wrote a comic book, she’d want there to be vampires in it.

The characters and the setting are similarly both mostly good, with some less successful elements marring the picture. The cast is generally appealing, especially Bec, a new friend who turns out to actually share some history with Margo, with engaging dialogue that helps keep the slower scenes moving. My only cavil is that there are a couple of characters who are just wearing giant “bad guy” hats, coming off much flatter than the others: the aforementioned Lee is one of them, but the mother is even worse, a vicious, unpleasant caricature of a human being. Melodrama needs stock villains, I suppose, but especially in that more naturalistic first hour, I felt some whiplash between the author’s effort to carefully sketch in Margo’s personality, and the whirling black hole of motiveless malice that is her mom (the fact that it seems like some of her behavior may be driven by OCD, but that’s never directly addressed or interrogated, also doesn’t feel great). It could be that the non-demo portion of the game adds some nuance, of course!

As for the setting, the strip-mall wasteland of a small town in the American Southwest is generally well realized, with attention paid to the flora and fauna. One detail struck me as jarringly ill-chosen, though, which is the blasé way the characters talk about the heat: like, I’ve been in Arizona a couple times when it was 110 degrees, that’s not a mild inconvenience that makes your walk to work slightly uncomfortable, it’s an assault by an angry God that can leave you dead if you stray too far from air conditioning.

But these complaints are getting more minor as I go, so I’ll repeat that but for the pacing, I found a lot to like in DEVIL’S LIMINAL – and even that was starting to pick up as I got to the end of the demo and the plot began to kick in. Honestly, if this were a traditional piece of IF I’d be tempted to try the full game to see where things ultimately go. Since it isn’t, and I’m not really a VN person at the end of the day, I’ll count myself content with the piece of the experience I got, and allow myself to imagine the places it might go – imaginings that show up a full page of text at a time.