It’s very important as a human being to engage with things that are not about you and you cannot relate with. I know this, and try to do this. However, I have always struggled with stories about religious trauma, as someone who hasn’t had religion in either a positive or negative sense play much of a role in their life. I can understand what it’s saying, but there’s a barrier that prevents me from being hit as hard as some people.

We Know the Devil is one of those games. It hits for the right person, but that person is unfortunately not me and I don’t think the rest of the game is good enough to compensate. Not bad by any stretch, but not the best. The writing ranges from poignant to stilted and ham-fisted. I played through all the endings, and the writing was by far the strongest in Venus’. The ostracization of a closeted trans woman who struggles to connect with male peers and can’t relate to the “real girls” as well as they can with each other is painfully believable. The other routes aren’t as strong.

The visual design is good, and contributes to the atmosphere. The audio is also mostly good, but sometimes poorly mixed, with certain tracks being much louder than others. The tracks themselves are good though.

I think this is just a game that isn’t for me, but I can see the merit in it. I do quite like the three girls and wish they all had a bit more depth and organic writing.

i really really don't like this style of writing? i don't know how to describe it other than exceedingly zoomer-ish. it's just the vibe it has going on - it feels really stilted, unnatural, is a headache to keep track of, and often just fills like taking up space until you get to what the game is actually about, which is also very obvious unfortunately. it goes on and on and on, with very flowery and winding narration/description, but it's never really in service of anything or communicating anything to the player. the dialogue can be even worse sometimes, characters just going on and on about nothing. it's just exceedingly overwrought, it feels like a first draft that needed many more lookovers, many more eyes on it, people asking the writer what exactly she meant by some of the lines in here, and changing those so that they can be better understood. idk, maybe it's a skill issue, but i've read more than a few visual novels (though admittedly not a lot) and this one has the worst prose by a good margin i'd say.

as an aside that isn't directly connected to the game, but i'm really tired of religion (christianity) being just. Evil. in every queer story it's in. like i understand why, it's very obvious why, but as someone who has christian queer/trans friends, i would really like to experience more stories that weren't so black and white with this kind of thing

(i didn't know how to put this into the review but the sound mixing is also really bad, the music at the end of the normal routes is so much louder than the rest of the soundtrack it made me jump in my chair lol)