Stunning.

I often find myself being at my harshest when it comes to kinetic novels, though especially towards indie projects made with Twine. I like works that can only operate at their fullest within the medium in which they were originally created; broadly speaking, I don't feel as though many independent written works featured on itch.io satisfy that particular desire of mine. Part of the appeal of visual novels as games rather than as books is through the audiovisual and interactive experience, and not simply the act of reading the text. Adding in music, visual art, player choices which lead to branching paths, warping or otherwise editing text in real-time — these are options that developers can include to capitalize on the fact that they are making video games rather than writing novels. If you include none of these things — if your project is little more than white text on black that you click "Next" to progress through without any ability to change the outcome of the narrative and without playing with the medium — what reason do you have to not simply publish it as a blog post, instead? You haven't done anything unique to the medium. Consider a theoretical game released by a composer that consists of nothing more than clicking on a song title, listening to the song, and then repeating this process for every remaining song. Without entering into an argument about whether this is a "game" at all, consider what I believe to be the more important question: would anything be lost if this wasn't a game? If this was simply an album released to Spotify, would anything be lost? If a Twine project without music or visual art or player choice or edited text was simply released as an article, would anything be lost? Games where you could move their contents to a different medium and lose nothing are inherently uninteresting to me.

To move The Devil's Imago to a different medium would destroy it.

Visually, this is a masterful usage of theming and layering. Diagrams of plant roots are presented next to diagrams of the nervous system. The Hanged Man card is layered directly over-top an image of an impaled man, censoring it. The tarot card spares you the sight once, but a later nightmare sequence allows you to look for a second time and see the true image hidden beneath the card. It's still monochromatic and rendered in a late-Medieval style, so it's difficult to make out exactly what's going on, which only serves to further enhance the horror spiraling out from beneath the narrative. Everything exists in a consistent style and palette; a dithered, sickly green and shades of gray that all melt together into a murky nightmare.

Essentially all of the CGs and sound effects are free stock assets, but they were utilized so well that I didn't even notice until I checked the attached "sources" document. It really speaks to the fact that you can go quite a ways in a creative endeavor without breaking the bank and without immense, broad talent; you don't need to be a master of writing and visual art and sound design and music and programming to make something incredible.

Not to suggest that the creator is untalented; Cecile Richard is very clearly a Renaissance individual who is capable of molding a variety of different media into a singular, cohesive work. A regulatory body ought to investigate them to make sure their personal history checks out; I've got a pet theory that they're a transplant from the Romantic era, sent to our time by some sort of arcane rituals carried out by their fellow Shelleys and Hoffmans. I did notice near the front-end of The Devil's Imago that the prose was remarkably purple for a game so strongly against royalty, but it eventually clicked as I continued to read that the author was invoking the Sublime. To see someone beating the absolute shit out of a thesaurus and slapping in every four-syllable synonym was something that was certainly a lot more impressive in the era before computers did it for you, and it's a common newbie-writer pitfall to include as many of these obscenely long words as you can. While I worried that this would be the case for The Devil's Imago, it isn't; a lot of very simple and very impactful sentences are layered throughout the work, contrasting against the flowery, overwritten, earlier parts of the work. As the narrative goes on and it becomes more and more difficult for the characters featured within to be poetic about the situation, the writing becomes simpler. As the plot becomes more and more inexplicable, it gets more complicated. This is an inspired choice. To be frank, the fact that I can talk about the common trappings of English Romantic-era poetry here and feel completely justified in doing so speaks not just to the quality of Cecile Richard's work, but also how utterly pedestrian a lot of video game writing tends to be. The AAA space with its millions of dollars and hundreds of writers' rooms wishes that it could even remotely compare to works being developed for pennies by a sum total of two people.

Without wanting to risk spoiling The Devil's Imago any more than I already have, I strongly, strongly encourage you to go through it for yourself. I cannot fucking believe that this game is free. This is far and away one of the best visual novels I've ever gone through, both in terms of writing prowess and aesthetic, and it's the exact kind of game that should serve as a monument for other developers to take inspiration from. More creators need to be directly influenced by this.

It only took until March to find the first five-star of the year.