of the Devil: Episode 1

• Reviews by Sam Amiotte-Beaulieu
• Published:

Not every card up its sleeve is a winner, but this stylish cyber-noir thriller impresses with its well-written, fiendishly dark mystery

In a rapidly advancing society where artificial intelligence and mega corporations are becoming an everyday reality, something about the idea of humanoid androids and flying cars still manages to captivate our imaginations. We want to see futuristic stories where small groups of everyman fight the good fight to put the “punk” back into “cyberpunk.” With their visual novel of the Devil, developer nth Circle Studios continues the time-honored tradition of fighting the power in a world of suffocating bureaucratic control, but handles this from a rather unusual angle in casting you as a lawyer with unique killer insights into the darker side of a cityscape drenched in neon and smoke. The debut of this card-themed episodic mystery is dripping with style and filled with memorable characters, and while some of its gameplay systems left me wondering if I'd been dealt a bad hand at first, you’ll be feeling like a high roller by the end of this incredible first full installment.

Episode 1 picks up after the explosive reveal at the end of the free Episode 0, and for the most part the world has moved on from the shocking crimes of the Heartbreak Killer. At least, Morgan has – ace defense attorney and playable protagonist in the cyberpunk hellscape of the mega city you call home in the year 2086. After defending your client from accusations of being a killer who murdered his girlfriend, things are relatively back to normal for Morgan. Well, as normal as things can be when you’re a defense lawyer in a world where the odds are constantly stacked against you, with 98% of cases going to trial resulting in a guilty verdict. That abruptly changes when she witnesses a breaking news story that David Ashur, her longtime friend and famous inventor of the modern android, has been found dead. 

You soon arrive at David’s penthouse living quarters after a brief call with his longtime executive assistant, Jessica Starling. Jess lets you know that before David died, he had made the rather strange request that Jess give something to you. Inside the penthouse, you soon uncover the “something” that David was referring to: a highly advanced android named Serra, more advanced than any other humanoid android on the market. What was the purpose of this last request from your old friend? Who was this android, and why was it important to David that you receive it? And most importantly of all, who or what killed David Ashur?

Compared to the relatively slow pace of Episode 0 (which I highly recommend playing before Episode 1, as the latter assumes you have played its predecessor already), you are thrown right into the deep end of this twisting new cyberpunk mystery. There were some clues about the sprawling nature of the megacity you call home in the free intro episode, but Episode 1 goes all in on displaying the immense scale of Morgan’s world. When I was first driven to David’s penthouse in an auto-driving flying cab, I was completely blown away by the grandeur of the towering metropolis I observed through the cab’s windows as I flew by. When you enter the headquarters of Noble, the megacorporation that employed David, the lobby seemingly expands infinitely upwards, dotted with brilliant lights and neon glow. It’s a fully realized world, equally awe-inspiring and suffocating in its depiction of absolute corporate control in an age of technological wonders.

The presentation is impressive: the cyberpunk world is rendered entirely in 3D, but all of the characters are portrayed in stylized 2D full-body stills. Characters do not animate in time with dialogue – rather, they will change poses and expressions to denote their feelings along with the text on-screen. Fun visual flourishes will pop up from time to time too – there’s a running gag of a little paper ball bouncing off the speaking character’s head that you could swear makes a little “d’oh!” sound every time you see it appear. Jess will pull out an inhaler at various points and take a long drag, or Serra will glow with a slight orange light to indicate her looking up something on the net. Each character is expressive and believable, and the wonderful artwork utilized in their designs makes them a joy to interact with. The investigation is accompanied by a heavy electronic bass soundtrack that evokes a grimy club vibe mixed with occasional soft notes of ethereal whispers. It’s a unique blend of genres that won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I found it to be incredibly enjoyable, fitting the tone of the game’s dark cyber-noir mystery beautifully.

Gameplay is relatively simple most of the time; of the Devil is controlled entirely through use of a mouse, outside of a couple rare instances where you are required to type in a code for a keypad using a physical keyboard. The menu is designed to look like apps on a smart phone, with all game options available at the top of the screen at all times while also being selectable from a literal smart phone. In addition to saving/loading and other standard settings, you also have a list of character profiles, a credit counter (more on that later), in-game search terms, evidence, and documents/articles that you can review at any time. These are all designed and written to be in-world, i.e. all of the character profiles are set up like social media profiles with their various likes/dislikes, and most articles you find are cut off at the end with some kind of message asking you to log in for their service behind a paywall. Everything feels authentic to this terminally online world of 2086.

Most of the game is told through typical visual novel progression: text will appear in a dialogue box at the bottom of the screen. Multiple characters can have their 2D stills displayed at the same time, but the character currently speaking will be lit up and all other characters will be darkened in the background. At times during conversation you will be provided with a dialogue tree that offers multiple options for responses or lines of inquiry. Typically you can choose all options before the game progresses, but in a few high-stakes situations you will only be able to pick one or two options from a full tree in order to avoid being penalized.

In between these dialogue-heavy sections, you will come upon scenarios that task you with investigating the environment to search for points of interest with clues to help in your case. Although rendered in 3D, these sections are experienced from a fixed point, with the camera swiveling around your position as you move your cursor. Whenever you find something pertinent, it will be highlighted with a big “Examine” button that pops up as a stylish hologram. Typically once you click on the highlighted spot, the screen will zoom into the location you’ve selected. Unfortunately, due to the futuristic tech look that everything is draped in, it isn’t always clear what you can and can’t interact with until you hover over it. There were multiple times I gave up trying to search for anything useful with my eyes and started scanning the entirety of the screen with my cursor. This is a shame, as the environments themselves are meticulously detailed. You are able to progress past some of these investigations without uncovering everything, but doing so means you may miss either valuable clues or information that could help you piece together the mysteries of your case. Whenever you have found everything you possibly can in that location, the game automatically moves you forward, which serves as an indicator that you have 100% cleared the area of anything useful. 

of the Devil

Genre:	Mystery
Presentation:	Realtime 3D
Theme:	Cyberpunk, Crime solving, Futuristic, Legal
Perspective:	First-Person
Gameplay:	Investigative, Visual novel
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Long (more than 10 hours)
Difficulty:	Medium
Graphic Style:	Cartoon

As you conduct investigations and click through dialogue trees with the characters you meet – human, machine and hologram alike – you will see what appear to be casino chips pop up and deposit themselves in the upper left corner of the screen. These are the credits you can check out on your smartphone at any time. While it isn’t immediately clear how they’re used, they are hugely important to collect. There is no penalty for examining everything, so skipping forward during investigations once you have the bare minimum of evidence can cause you to potentially miss out on this valuable resource when there are only specific places where you can build your stash.

What I have described so far amounts to roughly 75% of how of the Devil works. Then the remaining 25% makes its grand entrance: the courtroom trial. If you have ever played a game in the Ace Attorney series, you will have a general idea of how this works. As Morgan, you are defending your client for the crime they are on trial for allegedly committing, and it is up to you to use your deductive reasoning to call out inconsistencies in witness testimonies using the evidence you have gathered. Your opponent is the assistant district attorney, Emma Rockford – she’s a ruthless prosecutor who will stop at nothing to argue a guilty verdict despite her at-first aloof and sleepy demeanor.

At this point, various witnesses will be called to the stand to speak about their recollection of events. They will run through their testimony, and after finishing you will be able to go through the different points they brought up and object to any of the statements made. Once you object, rather than having time to review your evidence and pick something to back it up, you have mere seconds to choose one of the available pieces to present. I was not a fan of this timer element; while I understand wanting to be realistic in keeping pace with the natural flow of conversations in a real court case, this is a visual novel where careful consideration of your collected evidence and character details is key to success. Limiting the amount of time to consider options led to a lot of unnecessary frustrations, and I was surprised to have such a sudden break in the otherwise methodical pacing when I came upon these split-second choices. 

On top of the time limit imposed during these cross-examination sections, on several occasions I found myself feeling completely lost in the game’s logic as to how one contradiction would lead to the point Morgan was trying to make based off a witness statement. I would know exactly what was incorrect based on what I’d learned from the story thus far, along with the evidence I had gathered, but none of the available options made sense in the context of what I was trying to prove at that time. Typically I would come around to whatever conclusions the game wanted me to arrive at, but it was frustrating to feel like I knew what the game wanted me to say without giving me the specific option to say it.

Choosing an irrelevant piece of evidence or objecting to the wrong statement will cause the judge to penalize you in the form of losing chips – remember those from earlier? Whenever you point out an inconsistency correctly, you will receive an influx of chips that add to your credits, but answer wrong and the judge will ding you instead. Chips also factor into the trial’s secondary system, the raise/stay system where you play the trial like you’re in a poker game. (Morgan says as much at multiple points in both episodes.) At various points during cross-examinations, you will be prompted after a character states something that can prove hugely important to your case. In these situations, you can choose to “Stay” and let the character’s statement sit as is, or you can choose to “Raise” and Morgan will press the statement to see if it cracks under pressure. You can hover over both options to see Morgan’s thoughts on what each will have her respond with, which is a welcome addition to help weigh your options before possibly losing a large sum of chips.

You will also come upon “Blackjack” scenarios during trials where you go through individual statements in a similar manner to standard dialogue trees outside the courtroom. Unlike in those, however, “Blackjack” scenarios have the same high stakes as the other trial systems. You’ll be given the option to select from various points of inquiry to attempt to press a witness or other character, and similar to the raise/stay system you’ll be able to see what Morgan’s line of thinking will lead to if you choose a particular option. This time, though, at the bottom right of the screen, you’ll see a stack of poker face cards build up along with a number counter at the top right denoting how close your card pool is to Blackjack. As in the card game for which it is named, your goal is to get your line of inquiry pieced together to a solid 21/21. Correct inquiries will get you closer to that goal, and incorrect inquiries will cause you to “bust” and you’ll lose chips.

One final trial system is taken directly from the dramatic face-off you undertake during the end section of Episode 0, in which Emma will appear in a stylish close-up along with a card table where evidence is laid out as if each piece is a separate card. You’ll have a stack of “cards” being played against you, and it’s your job to play your own evidence that contradicts Emma’s stack. If you play the right card, you’ll point out a contradiction and gain some chips for your credit stash. If you play wrong, you’ll take a hit to your credits just like the other systems during the trial. 

In a casual playthrough, you can save your game at any time and reload as often as you want in order to ensure you don’t run out of chips and experience a game over. However, there is also a High Roller Mode where you only have one save file, can only reload outside of the courtroom, and you receive higher penalties to your chips when you make a mistake. I chose this mode for my playthrough, as I typically use a single save file when playing through visual novels regardless, and I can confidently say that I would not recommend it to most first-time players. You receive a charm to customize your in-game smartphone after completing this mode, but it is not worth having to balance such huge stakes in a game where story is king at the end of the day.

Either way, it’s easy to become invested in the world and its characters. You’ll travel to huge imposing skyscrapers along with seedy side alley clubs, and each location I visited made me want to dive deeper into this fascinating setting. New discoveries continually draw you closer to the source of the jet black heart of truth at the center, and everything works together to keep the story compelling throughout. Every time I thought I had the narrative figured out, I’d be thrown a curveball that would completely upend my hypotheses and cause me to rethink everything I’d learned. Characters have deeply complex motivations, and there’s less right versus wrong and more various shades of gray in its subject matter. The game even explores some complex ideas of what makes us human, along with the implications of a world where androids with skin and faces just like us are being assigned to a class of servitude. It’s an incredibly well-written plot overall, with a conclusion that neatly wraps up all the threads that come to light over the course of the game’s 10-12 hour runtime. The mystery went places I wasn’t expecting, and the ultimate reveals at the end of this episode genuinely surprised me, leaving the door open with small hints at where the story might go next.

Final Verdict

Following an already impressive free first installment, of the Devil: Episode 1 is a much bigger, incredibly stylish and captivating mystery in a world that feels both sprawling and suffocating in equal measure. It’s a shame that some pixel hunting tends to dilute the investigative experience rather than enhance it, but I still enjoyed exploring the 3D spaces to uncover clues, and the game really excels when it’s focused on its writing and characters. The courtroom too has some incredible story moments, but there are a few logic gaps and the additional mechanics that liken a trial to a poker game, while flashy, add a level of frustration that I can’t help but feel wouldn’t exist if these were handled more like Ace Attorney, with specific, clearly defined rewards and penalties. Fortunately these are relatively minor complaints in what is otherwise a solid and substantial episode with a compelling case and wonderful world-building. I sincerely hope the series continues, further cleaning up those few last mechanics that tarnish its shine to a more neon glow.

Same played of the Devil: Episode 1 on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.

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