Day six. I have styled my phone's homescreen using image-displaying widgets to display pictures of Firefly. I got through a particularly tough day of work without the use of any stimulants by thinking about Firefly. I have discussed Firefly's status on internet messaging apps for at least 5.3k words. I have approximately 192 pulls saved up in the event that I can eventually use them to obtain Firefly. Youtube recommends me an average of three Firefly-related videos per refresh.
The shadows on the walls grow larger and I cannot seem to glimpse the sun anymore.
There is nothing left for me here. The only way is down.

I knew better than to pick this up, but I didn't listen to my gut. I knew very little about it and the title gave me pause; but I didn't want to judge without playing it. Now I'm here to say you can absolutely judge something exactly right before the experience. Somehow it's even worse than what I imagined. I am begging video game studios to stop writing about traumas they do not know. Or without any nuance. How this ever got published is beyond me.

And to reiterate from my experience with The Medium, you can tell dark stories with horrible events and horrible characters. I am not condemning that. Shit like this happens in real life. You can absolutely talk about it. But when it's so toxic, without discussion about the effect on the victims, and no discussion about why it's harmful, it's dangerous. Not a single voice in this game called out the harmful behavior shown here. It's one thing to have a horrible character do something, but when ALL the characters seem okay with the act, I'm looking at the writers. Because clearly they don't have a problem with the subject.

The ONLY thing that was a positive was exploring the setting, an abandoned hotel. As a typical walking sim, the playable character is painstakingly slow. But it was fun to walk around, even on day one to find hidden secrets. But that's it. Everything else? Pass.

You play as Nicole, who visits her family's hotel after being gone for a decade. She left with her mother when her parents divorced at 16. She is now the owner of the hotel and wants to sell it. First off, she comes off as a horrible...well, bitch. She's combative towards the one other character (Irving), denies her trauma, and essentially a miserable person. She immediately attacks Irving, that speaks with you over a cell phone. He's the exact opposite of her personality. Stumbling over his words, panicky, and constantly apologizes. You know the game isn't going to have outstanding characters or dialogue.

The real sin is the story. The awful, awful shit that did not need to be written or shared with anyone. I will be blatant with my words and that could be a trigger for someone. Please take care of yourself and don't read if you're not able.


I will try to summarize my disgust with the story. Basically, Nicole's parents split because her father had an "affair" with a 16-year-old high school student, Rachel. He was her instructor and he got her pregnant. Soon after, Rachel supposedly threw herself off of a cliff. Nicole's mother found out, took her and left her father and the hotel. The game starts with the mother's note calling Rachel a young woman. How her death destroyed their family. Nothing about the father's infidelity or, let's face it, pedophilia. It was all Rachel's fault the family split.

During the game, Nicole finds disturbing notes written by her father. His writings about how he "loved" Rachel. How she was a light in his life. A man nearing his 50s, talking about a 16-year-old girl. The fact this game is set in Montana is not lost on me. But there is no reason a man should be attracted to a girl 30 years younger than him. A girl still in school and his student no less.

Nicole says NOTHING about this. Not shocked at all the "woman" he had an affair with, was actually a girl her age at the time. In fact, she continues to reminisce about how he was an interesting and intelligent man. A father she very much looked up to. I thought, okay, maybe she's in denial after learning her father is a monster, a pedophile. That would shock me. Nope. Never. Not ONCE does she act disgusted by the fact her father groomed and raped a girl her age.

Instead, she has a memory where she viewed Rachel as "mature and elegant for her age." Excuse me? You were the same age Nicole. A child and a daddy's girl. But somehow this 16 year old is viewed as an adult? Further into the game, Irving talks about her father's and Rachel's "relationship." How her father was a good thing to happen to Rachel. He gave her strength. He guided her. Their love was pure. Fucking excuse me? He follows Nicole's behavior by putting her father onto a pedestal. Saying how her father was unfairly mistreated for their "love." The father, a pedo, is shown as a Christ-like figure. How his intentions was pure, and he suffered after Rachel's death. The entire conversation was all around fucking sick. They both missed this disgusting man, who was never punished for his actions. Rachel was the one that suffered. She was a child and she died because of it!

Later in the game, Nicole finds a horrifying room that her father constructed as a tribute for Rachel. A small room with a small child's bed, a chalkboard with the R-slur written on it, and toys: a rocking horse and toy blocks. There are drawings on the walls in crayon as furniture and windows. Despite Nicole earlier comment about Rachel being mature, she accurately describes this room as a child's room. This language is important because despite what the developers want you believe, Rachel was not a mature young woman. She was a CHILD. You can say Rachel was in a loving relationship with an older man. That she was "mature for her age" and could give consent. Yet here this scene shows me Rachel was, in fact, a child. Again Nicole does not respond to the fact her father was with a child! Always bounces around the fact her father was sick and had a sexual obsession with a child who could not consent.

Not one character with a voice in this game condemns her father and his actions. Not once. Nicole doesn't bring up the age gap or consent. Irving encourages the pedo behavior, saying it was pure love. The father through a recording, says he loved Rachel. The mother paints Rachel as a young woman who destroyed their family. You never hear from Rachel. How she felt, what she was experiencing through this. It's mostly from Nicole and Irving, who were not in this "relationship." The grooming is almost glorified at this point. Never says it's harmful. It's absolutely disgusting.

Then the big reveal. The big mystery. Nicole finds a hidden bloody blanket with Rachel's retainer and has a magical moment of memory and concludes her mother killed Rachel. Beat her to death. Then tossed her body carelessly over that cliff. Somehow made it look like a suicide. Now you found out, not only is your father sick, your mother was a damn murderer.

After all this talk, the game rewards you with one of the worst endings I have ever witnessed. Nicole decides, she better follow her father's and mother's suicide. By forcing you with a step-by-step suicide. You are placed in her car, in a garage, to die. You can stop at the very end; however, the ending with Nicole's suicide is considered the "good" ending because now she's with her family. Yep you die in the end. And it's not the guilt of what happened with Rachel, or finding out about her sick father or mother.

During her suicide, Nicole has a line of "I don't want to die!" as you are literally played to kill her. Then with the largest slap to the face, she says "I'm back home. And I'll stay here forever. When we see each other again, Rachel can come along." Fucking WHAT? Bitch your fathered raped Rachel and your mother murdered her for it. Why the fuck would she want to be with your family in any afterlife?? Are you shitting me right now?

Do not play this game. Do not even try for this short, easy platinum. It is not worth it. None of it is redeemable. There is nothing here but a fantasy of some very sick individuals.

Demon’s Roots is frustrating. It’s a game I love, though.

This is a game I got recommended through a pinned post on social media describing it as "10/10 kinoge'' and "yuripilled." I don't know what kinoge means and I'd say more 9/10 but it's pretty damn yuripilled, even if it takes a while to get there it's really intense and nice when you get to it, was not entirely disappointed by this recommendation. The short description made by this post did not have the space to tell me everything else I had to deal with, so I guess I'll try to expand it.

Demon’s Roots tasks you with freeing people from slavery, denounces it, calls it out as a cause of human suffering and an atrocity and so forth, and a product of evil, but then dedicates half of its art and an entire side mode to erotic depictions of sexual slavery. This undermines both its attempts at being erotic AND its attempts at denouncing it and building a narrative against it, as presenting each scene of sexual abuse as tragic and sad undercuts the ability of the people who would enjoy such scenes erotically to, well, enjoy it. (I assume, at least.)

I have mixed feelings on noncon fantasy as a kink, but I don’t believe that anyone who participates in such a thing is innately morally bad or any more likely to commit immoral acts. I have respect for it at a distance, it’s not for me and it’s not something I can personally dissect all the way, but I have nothing against noncon fantasy in a context-less setting.

The issue I have with it is just the fact that it’s handled so poorly within the context of the rest of the game. To say “I am against these things in reality and am making this erotic piece as a form of fantasy” as a note before an erotic piece is normal. Bringing up the fetish in the context of a discussion on sexual abuse to expand the discussion can be reasonable. Talking about how horrific sexual abuse is while stapling a video of your favorite noncon hentai in the middle, talking about said hentai in excessive detail and half-trying to pass it off as an example, is insanely confusing.

The most annoying part is that when it’s not doing this insanely confusing dance, it’s genuinely captivating as a narrative. The characters and how they interact are memorable and emotional. People react realistically to their situations. It lands in a loveable spot between love-conquers-all and grimdark, a beautiful kind of bittersweet characterized by sacrifice and loss and things not going how they were supposed to but it all having been worth it. While its oppression narrative is handled a bit rough at times (mainly relative to the previous complaints,) most of its themes and messages are handled in compelling ways. Solidarity between the oppressed, community, hope beyond hope, forgiveness, the things loneliness can do to people, I could go on and on. The complex (positive) emotions this game made me experience are exceptional, it ranks highly on that spectrum for me. It practically makes up for all of the flaws in my opinion. I wish it didn't have to make up for it, but I'm still happy this game felt satisfying to finish in spite of its flaws and the times where I felt so frustrated with it that I wanted to quit. It was worth it.

It’s kind of difficult to talk about the good parts, unfortunately, because properly selling the emotional narrative requires so much context and framing that it just can’t really be elevator pitched. It also doesn’t help that when I try to verbalize my feelings on my favorite parts of the story I tend to start sobbing. Sorry I can’t quite get it down here, but it’s really, really good, or else I wouldn’t be talking about all my problems with it in such detail.

The gameplay is pretty average RPGmaker stuff, nothing special but I’m a sucker for that kinda thing. Points added for having fun skills and a good amount of those satisfying "doing everything right and getting a huge damage number" moments. Points off for the fact that most of the game is cheesed through stacking evasion on a character that can take any hits intended for other teammates, giving you endless (slightly RNG-based but pretty consistent) invincibility. Points added again for lots of neat optional content.

It’s also highly worth noting that the version sold on steam is an unfinished version of the game. I’m not talking about the sex stuff being removed I mean like, day 1 modern Bethesda release here. (For reference: this version removes pretty much all of the games’ sexual content in a often strange manner, assumedly to follow Steam’s now-removed rules banning the hosting of sexual content focused games.) This version is missing multiple gameplay features. Notably the difficulty selection is replaced with being given 80 of every healing and stat item upon starting, which feels very alpha-build-y, various character sprites and art pieces are missing, and by chapter 2 I gave up on trying to complete the game patchless after having a temporary, one-area, intense debuff become irremovable due to a missing NPC. It’s downright broken.

I wanted to try beating the default version because the artstyle wasn’t the kind I usually find sexy, but it was just objectively a worse version of the game. I gave up and installed the official restoration patch, and sped through the portion of the game I’d already cleared (since I’d screwed up my original save in hackneyed attempts to fix my issues.)

The “R-18 skip” feature available in the patched version is somewhat effective at dodging its awkward sex scenes, there’s times where you can tell they had a tough time trying to gloss over it but it’s not horrific. This does, frustratingly at times, lock you out of certain areas of the game, though. One is just a sex scene centric area that would be mostly fine to ignore if not for the fact it has some solid exclusive weapons and accessories you might be sad to miss. Another is an optional dungeon-ish area with a unique boss fight and strong rewards from it, and the last major thing is an entire side-mode called “Bad End mode” with a unique gameplay loop that (to my understanding based on guides, I didn’t play it cause the noncon scene orientedness turned me off to it) makes the typical JRPG combat loop a lot more tactical. This mode only gives one okay main game accessory and no other unlocks besides more scenes in the cutscene viewer, so it’s not the most lamented thing, but still a little sad.

So I guess my point is just install the damn patch and turn on R18 skip if you think you won't wanna see that. Ultimately I hope you can find the beauty in it that I did.

I really love this game, genuinely, deeply, which makes me hate all of the confusing decisions in it even more. If it were simply a bad game with a mediocre plot and whatnot I could just stop giving a crap but I love it and that comes with baggage. Grr.