Demon Game for Sophie.

(I beta tested this game)

Rarely has a game made me feel like so much of a rube. I had a lot of fun testing Demon Game for Sophie and played it through several times – the RPG-lite elements of this story of an assassin sent from Hell to kill a corrupt prelate mean that leaning into stealth rather than deceitful words lends a distinct flavor to some key moments, as well as making the combat sequences play very differently. And my first time exploring the downbeat early-modern squalor of the city where the priest lurks left several of its deeper mysteries intact, which made going back and taking another run at them all the more enticing – there was an enigmatic, incomplete tarot reading, a maze puzzle I didn’t fully wrap my head around, and the tantalizing prospect of a non-combat solution to dealing with a bereaved specter. On top of that, the prose was wonderful, leaning into the devil’s cynical view of human nature while expressing real outrage at the injustices and petty cruelties it witnesses:

You approach a pawnbroker, a woman who strips memories like paint, cleaning wedding rings, lockets, and tobacco cases of everything they once meant so they can be sold on clean to matter less to their next owner.

So I wrote up my feedback on balance and builds and progression and clueing and cheerfully sent it off, mentioning that I felt like I hadn’t quite plumbed the last mystery but found it a very fun, satisfying game nonetheless, only for the author to inquire whether I’d played with the sound on, which is emphasized as a critical element of the game on the opening screen. Of course I’d blithely ignored it, lots of games say that but listening is so slow compared to reading and I usually don’t have the luxury of just sitting around for an uninterrupted hour with my headphones on.

The final game, perhaps because of idiot players like me, boasts the same announcement on the opening screen but also a hard of hearing mode that I activated with a somewhat guilty conscience, so I could see what I was missing. It was a lot! In fact there’s a whole additional layer to the story, in fact the primary one, an autofictional tale of horror where the author’s (“the author’s”) depression, Weltzschmerz, and romantic fecklessness lead to a slow slide towards shocking, bestial acts. It’s as well-written as the more nakedly fictional one, especially in the early, more grounded bits which are interspersed with the RPG – once it takes over fully and starts barreling along to the conclusion, the memoir-ish conceit starts to fray, though there’s undeniable momentum to these sections.

But regardless, completely missing such a major element of the game makes me feel rather oblivious. What’s worse, the voiced narration often critiques the fiction layer, decrying it as vapid, an empty power fantasy of unquestioned obedience. I can see the point, and of course the narrator is in a bad state so we’re certainly not supposed to accept his pronouncements uncritically. But still, I feel a bit like a rube because I did like Demon Game for Sophie quite a lot even when I was just playing the Demon Game part and had no idea what “for Sophie” meant; now that I understand that, I like it even more.