Devils of Terminology

The political theorist Isaiah Berlin has a famous essay where he proposes that there are two kinds of thinkers: hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs have one big idea, a totalizing framework they bring to bear on every phenomenon they encounter with maniacal, monotonous fervor. Foxes, by contrast, refuse to be pinned down, flitting from topic to topic, idea to idea, carrying perhaps a unifying vibe or approach to each of their latest obsessions but in it for the quick burst of novel insight rather than the grinding endurance of a monumental life’s work. In truth, human beings can’t be typified quite so neatly – though of course I’d say that, since I count myself among the foxes – but perhaps pieces of IF can, and if so, Devils of Terminology leaves me yearning for a fretful porpentine.

A recitation of the themes and elements this modest-length visual novel employs over the course of its breathless plot is only slightly less bewildering than experiencing them in gameplay. There’s a teenager who orphans herself by getting angry at her parents for forgetting her birthday, two different supernatural trains, a typewriter automaton named Nihil who can come up with magical names for places (and which is patterned after a human with maybe-related powers?), a seaside town called “Lost, the Clockwork City” and which plays host to a pair of Dark-Souls-style minibosses (he’s a giant, she’s a wizard), a horned she-devil who is allegedly also Dante Alighieri, paired trinities of past, present, and future, and hell, purgatory, and heaven, a fracture in the sky that destabilizes the world, a sword made of bone and sinew, and the world’s most confusing Sherlock-and-Watson double-act (right, this all allegedly playing in out in late-Victorian London).

I’m not so simple a rube as to require everything that happens in a game to have an explanation, much less one telegraphed to the player, but this cavalcade of stuff created two issues for me. First, there are few connections drawn between the disparate material, either thematic or narrative. Actually, almost as soon as one idea is introduced, it’s dropped in favor of the next: the Dante reveal is played as a big deal, for example, and despite it making no sense I was curious where the game was going with it, like were we going to get into the details of their travels to the underworld, or rhapsodies on their encounter with the divine, or at least some parallels drawn between the way the devil acts as a sort of guide to the main character, mirroring Virgil’s role in the Divine Comedy? No, everyone just goes “no way, you’re really Dante?!” and then never mentions it again. As a result, rather than a thematic bricolage where each new idea helps recontextualize those it’s placed next to, the game comes across as just a jumble of stuff, growing less compelling with each new twist.

The second issue is that the narrative stakes were never made clear. If Devils were a picaresque where a simple journey narrative took the player through a series of unconnected but memorable vignettes, with the ultimate destination clearly telegraphed, that might not be the most compelling thing in the world but at least you’d have a sense of where you were headed. But while the game feints towards such a structure by having the main character be a detective who investigates a series of cases, and allots a few of its portentous revelations to establishing the aforementioned trinities which at least give a sense of when the game is ending, the climactic plot elements felt just as much like rug-pulls as the earlier ones.

Now, I need to acknowledge the elephant in the room and point out that the game’s English text is a translation of the Korean original, so it could be that things are much smoother in the author’s mother tongue. But still, having to judge the game by the language in which I can engage with it, at both the macro and the micro levels the writing left me struggling. Like, here’s a bit of what I think is supposed to be playful banter between the main character and their devil sidekick:

Us: the person who returned claimed to have seen Heaven. Do you remember anything about them?

Renua thought for a moment, then answered readily.

R: They were called a genius, right? That’s all I remember~

Us: ..A genius.

She was always like this.

Always thinking about ways to play around, yet somehow useful at moments like these.

The deeper elements of the game’s design doesn’t help matters, unfortunately. It uses a custom system whose interface is superficially similar to VN-standby RenPy. But while I’ve figured out how to tweak that platform to my liking, here I was frustrated by the inability to set text to display instantly and the lack of a quick scroll forward/scrollback system (or easy undo), and small pieces of friction like long lines of dialogue being cut off and the redundant-but-not-identical Log and History features eventually added up. Meanwhile, the game’s only mechanics are a scant handful of choices, spread thinly across the game’s hour and a half running time, with the player’s input rarely feeling especially impactful – there’s an early bit where I took the option to press a client on some details before accepting their case, but actually clicking that led to some commentary on stuff happening outside the window and then yet more sidekick banter.

All told this means I spent most of my time with Devils of Terminology just clicking to see what was going to happen next, not especially invested in or comprehending whatever left-turn was waiting around the corner. This is a shame, because there is a lot of invention and imagination to the game, and the basic tropes and themes are I think appealing ones. But it’s ultimately too hyperactive for its own good – rather than desperately prancing about as though it were just one step ahead of the hounds, Devils would have been better off hunkering down, sniffing out a promising direction, and digging in.