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About the StoryAnyone can kill the devil; that's why they always make teens the vampire slayers, the magical girls. But some kids can't even get that right; and that's why meangirl Neptune, tomboy Jupiter, and shy shy Venus have to endure one more week of summer camp and each other, singing boring songs about jesus, doing busywork for adults, and hoping god's radio can't hear them. Game Details
Language: English (en)
First Publication Date: September 12, 2015 Current Version: Unknown License: Commercial Development System: Custom Forgiveness Rating: Merciful IFID: Unknown TUID: vyg71eftve9ffxx5 Referenced in Heaven Will Be Mine, by Aevee Bee and Mia Schwartz |
Awards
Nominee, Best Use of Multimedia - 2015 XYZZY Awards
Tags
Member Reviews
| Average Rating:  Number of Reviews: 1 Write a review |
Queerness and universal love, August 26, 2020We Know the Devil is a relatively short visual novel, which takes perhaps one hour to play through once and two hours to play through exhaustively. It follows three teenagers -- Venus, Neptune and Jupiter -- who have been sent to a strange Christian summer camp for 'bad children' where it seems quite possible that they have to literally fight the devil. All three suffer from the fact that they do not fit the societal criteria for being a good person, and they have developed some rather unsuccessful coping mechanisms for dealing with this.
The piece is great at building atmosphere, coming with excellent writing, minimal but very appropriate art, and an unsettling sound track, all of which strengthen each other. Choice points are relatively rare, and always of the same type: you have to choose two of the three teenagers to do something together, leaving the third one out. This is also the main thing that the piece is exploring: the dynamics of a group of three people, and the results of being the one who is left out.
In order to truly experience and understand the piece, one has to seek out all four possible endings. This is no doubt the weakness of the game, since doing so requires one to revisit again and again text one has already experienced, and making rather mechanical choices in between. While there is a useful ad irresistible fast-forward button, using this is very detrimental to the reading experience.
That said, pursuing all endings pays off. The game wrestles with serious questions about relationships, acceptance & self-acceptance, queerness, and the universality of love. (I say much more about this in my spoilery video analysis.) It's a piece that I kept thinking about long after I had finished it.
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Recommended Lists
We Know the Devil appears in the following Recommended Lists:2020 Alternative Top 100 by Denk
(Created 24-Jul-2020) Philosophy: 1. If a game only has 5-star ratings, it is because the game hasn't received enough ratings. 2. Games with few ratings can still be among the best. 3. Sometimes the average score is the best metric. The...
Polls
The following polls include votes for We Know the Devil:Christianity in IF by Bainespal
Sam Kabo Ashwell's statement in his recent review of Cana According to Micah that "the best works dealing prominently with Christian themes are written by non-Christians" made me curious. Perhaps a list of games with serious Christian...
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This is version 6 of this page, edited by lunaterra on 10 May 2019 at 11:33pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item