Devils of Terminology

Devils of Terminology is a visual novel about a detective in an alternate Victorian England plagued by supernatural phenomena. The detective has a special bond with a "devil of terminology" named Renua that allows them to investigate these phenomena—but more than that, the strange happenings might have a particular connection to their identity, past, and future.

I suspect that a lot of people are going to play Devils of Terminology, come away feeling like they don't get it, and chalk that up to either not being into VNs or this particular VN having been translated from the Korean. But I'm a big VN fan—I understand this medium and how this genre appears in it, I think I can even recognize some of this game's inspirations, and I've sifted through far worse translations to puzzle out far more convoluted plots. So I should be perfectly positioned to make sense of Devils of Terminology, and... to be honest with you, I still don't think I get it. Playing it, I never quite felt like I had a grasp on the PC's personality or goals or past, or on how the setting worked, or on how metaphorical/allegorical any given thing was supposed to be.

The whole thing has the feeling of one of those dreams that feels like it has a coherent plot while you're having it, but then you wake up and realize that there are all sorts of things that don't add up. For instance, there's a scene in which another character refers to Renua as "Dante", which I at first took as that character making a literary reference, but then it was treated as a big reveal about Renua's identity, except that I'm not really sure what it was supposed to reveal about her identity (I'm pretty sure she's not supposed to be the actual Dante Alighieri?). And then it doesn't come up again until the final scene, in which it's also not explained because the emphasis is on Renua being revealed to have yet a third name, but I'm not really clear what the significance of that one is supposed to be either.

This is all a shame, because I want to love Devils of Terminology. I love supernatural mysteries, I love historical fantasy, I love surreal metaphorical dreamlike narratives. The choice selections mostly don't feel too consequential, but there's a section where the choice-based gameplay gets meta in a way I thought was really interesting and could have appreciated even more if I had a stronger sense of the game's themes and how that section connects to them. The relationship between the detective and Renua has a love/hate element that could be very compelling to me (and then the ending implies that it's some kind of (Spoiler - click to show)time loop future-self-on-past-self toxic yuri situation, which is the kind of bonkers decision I have to respect and could under the right circumstances be delighted by).

But I never quite managed to get my bearings in the narrative enough for any of these things to hit for me in the way I wanted them to. I was in a constant state of wondering: What is happening? Why is it happening? Why does it matter? And honestly, being left wondering about the first two things can be fun sometimes! With the third, though, you start to lose me, and Devils of Terminology never really overcame that.