IFComp 2020: Deelzebub
Comments(1) Playing this game made me uncomfortable, mostly in small ways. The map is just a little bit confusing, in a way that sent me stumbling into the same wrong rooms repeatedly. Progress in the story is often dependent on focusing on things that didn’t stand out as important, either scenery objects or nouns mentioned offhand in conversation. And it’s written in the third person. The protagonist is a dim but amiable man named Reginald, and there are enough encounters with enough different NPCs that when the output mentioned Reginald by name, I often thought for just a moment that it was talking about someone else, and consequently tried talking to Reginald or whatever. This wasn’t a sticking point, but it did remind me repeatedly that my thoughts weren’t where the author wanted them.
The third-person narration is linked to a conceit that you’re “a voice in Reginald’s head”, telling him what to do, an idea that is never really addressed after the very beginning. The game starts out by just throwing away your first several commands, as Reginald reacts to suddenly having a voice in his head, which sets us wrong-footed from the get-go. When the story started talking about summoning demons, the connection seemed obvious: I’m a demon possessing Reginald, right? But no, the story never draws that connection. I’m not sure it even occurred to the author. I mean, it seemed pretty obvious to me, but we’ve already established that their headspace is unlike mine.
The summoning of a bona fide demon seems like it would be momentous, something that would rock Reginald’s world, but once that episode is over, it’s over. He goes back to just running errands for his cult leader afterward as if nothing happened.
Yes, Reginald is a member of a cult. That’s clear from the very beginning. The entire setting of the game is a cult compound, but it’s presented from Reginald’s point of view, without conspicuous irony, and he’s so reluctant to recognize it as a cult that I started to wonder if the author knew, and ask if my sympathies were supposed to lie with the cult. Part of the problem here is that this is a story of betrayal, where the player has to make multiple difficult choices about what side to take, who to trust and whose trust he should abuse. It’s presented as a light-hearted comedy.
For what it’s worth, one of the endings does circle back to what it means that the player is a voice in Reginald’s head. But I think that’s the only time. I agree that the game could have done more with that.