JESUS SAVES.

Sometimes a work comes along that feels like it was made for you. I’d like someone to break into the dev's office to confirm whether or not they’ve got satellite images of my house. I’m not certain what I was prepared for, going into this — all I really had to go off of was the ridiculously good box art — but the initial point-and-click exploration blobber gameplay hooked me. It’s a unique method of exploring this castle; most point-and-click games would take you directly to the next screen, while a game that gave you direct movement controls would be even more granular. This is more in the vein of something like Shin Megami Tensei, and it’s a really neat way to handle walking through these dark corridors. While this isn’t an especially frightening title, this is still a good method for building some tension while you explore.

Of course, this only lasts for about as long as it takes you to enter your first combat encounter. You meet a goddess who gives you a rosary to protect yourself, and you’re immediately pitted again a demon with the sole instruction to click the bead color that matches its eyes. A cross engraved with JESUS SAVES slams into its face, the demon’s head cracks open with a little hand-drawn animation, and you get a triumphant jingle on the following results screen which gives you an exorcism ranking. It’s a dramatic tonal shift, and it fucking rules. It marked the exact moment that I knew I was going to fall in love with this game.

I’m a sucker for the mixed-media approach that’s already here — a lot of the enemies look like drawings clipped out of demonology books, contrasting the overworld sprites and the dithered castle graphics — and the back-and-forth swinging between goofy minigames and tense exploration works in a way that seldom does anywhere else. There’s even a massive genre shift near the halfway point, where the game turns into a top-down RPG Maker game where you walk around solving puzzles and exploring dream-like areas beyond the castle walls. There’s so much going on here, and it would be so easy for all of this to feel sloppy and unfocused, and it doesn’t. I don’t know how Odencat and Fuming managed.

I’m just stunned at how perfectly this aligns with my tastes. It desperately needs to be experienced, because discussion without that baseline of having played it is near-meaningless. This is a dense work with a lot of little branches, and there’s going to be a lot that I missed on my playthrough that someone else picked up on right away. I'm surprised at how little I'm managing to come up with. Normally I'm incapable of shutting the fuck up. I've obviously written enough that I can't claim to have been left speechless, but there are only so many ways that I can say "I love everything here". This is my hole. It was made for me.

Oh, the power of friendship saves the day? Splendid.