DEVIL'S LIMINAL

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Choice Select
Played: 7/2/26
Playtime: 1hr, demo complete

I am from the Southwest, let’s get that out of the way right up front. Setting a magical realist work in that setting is almost certainly starting life on third base for me, as it were. The work does a lot of things right. Its adrift young adult protagonist is hovering between high school and college, enduring a fraught home situation in a town of limited opportunity. It is all so specific, so matter-of-factly rendered that it can’t help but draw you in. Our protag is starting a summer job, meeting new people, reacquainting with childhood friends and trying to keep a simmering home life from boiling over.

Among the many positives in the work, the artwork is the most prominent. Despite its southwestern setting, the palette is dark: greys and blacks where you might expect brilliant sun and tans. This choice, particularly when rendering southwest scenery, creates a kind of Lynchian mood, of rendering the familiar odd and off putting through aggressive presentation. It seems to suit the work particularly well, setting the tone of the piece nicely.

The rendering also contrasts to the more prosaic parts of the narrative, where new friendships and complicated old dynamics are awkward and sometimes uncomfortable, but in a grounded, realistic way. It has the effect of never quite letting us settle into the slice-of-life narrative we are experiencing. The artwork is aided in this mood setting by offhand references to an absent father that hint at outre’ family history but never MORE than hint. I found this portion of the work engaging - there is an admirable variety of interpersonal relationships built up, creating a full impression of the protag’s life.

The piece really came alive for me when it introduced the supernatural. It took the time to ground our protagonist and flesh her out, so that her reactions and engagement with the strange felt natural and not-quite-in-an-intriguing-way relatable. The details of the supernatural (barely introduced in this demo) are tantalizingly weird, specific and singular. To me, they sang off the southwest setting in a wonderful way, alluding to a unique-feeling mythos that was mostly in shadow. This choice let the details we DID see tickle our antenna in weird, inscrutable ways, effectively doing what much supernatural fiction fails to do: convey the existence of mechanisms beyond our physics that are at once fascinating and scary.

All this was in the work’s favor. There were, however, some elements to the work I struggled with. For one, I felt it did not QUITE fully land its setting. It will probably not shock you outlanders that the most salient element of the southwest is HEAT. Devil’s Liminal really glosses over the unavoidable central feature of this lifestyle. The amount of time the cast spends out of doors is questionable, though not unheard of. Not acknowledging the suffering that entails is less forgivable. Further, not making an overt point of always carrying water, and ACTIVELY CHASTISING FRIENDS WHO DON’T is deeply counter to my experience. If I had to put a finger on a defining detail of my southwest life, that would be it. Its absence chafed at me, not gonna lie. This is ARIZONA IN THE SUMMER. We ENDURE it. Rarely this gracefully.

Despite the ire I just poured on it, that is ultimately a quibble. Certainly it would have no impact on outlanders’ enjoyment of this work. A much bigger reservation, for me, was the revelation that (Spoiler - click to show)our protagonist is a Special, Chosen One. The work had really effectively painted a unique, strange supernatural element that felt singular and intriguing (no mean feat against the wealth of prior art!). I couldn’t help but feel disappointed when it regressed into that familiar trope - it felt like I was losing something that made this special.

My last reservation was a little more subtle, and I’m not even sure it will outlast this demo experience. When creating interactive works, there is a spectrum of protagonist engagement. From a faceless adventurer whose entire character is supplied by the player, to super-specific visual-novel character the player can observe but not really influence. (Here I am talking about the nature of the character, not the puzzle-solving actions they must take, though admittedly there is not a hard line between those two.) Somewhere in the middle is a protagonist with shades of behavior and reactions the player can tailor while the narrative is mostly unchanged. That is where we seem to live here. I just don’t think it quite landed for me. Interactions and developments typically have few choices of response, whose specifics are more alike than different. This kind of choice is an authorial challenge, no doubt about it. The cumulative weight of such choices must be provisioned throughout the length of the game. Many such choices can lead to a very subtle collaborative character that can be undone with clumsy text that does not fully honor those prior choices. It can create a spiderweb of if-else adjective space. Its LACK however is just as awkward. Here, I felt the choices were bounded by a protagonist character so closely as to render the choices too constrained to satisfy. The work seemed to SUGGEST I could collaborate on the protag’s character, but not follow through on it. This is a peril pretty specific to early game, I would say. As the plot picks up steam this would likely not be as foregrounded. But for this demo, where so much is about establishing character and setting, it looms large.

Where does this leave me? I think the things it does right DO outweigh these misgivings and I do recommend checking it out to see if this is for you. In particular, the promise of bouncing all of these deftly established relationships off the supernatural twist is particularly promising. I am on the fence at the moment whether I can let go of my quibbles and pursue the final work when released. That’s probably a me thing, not a you thing though.

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.