There is only one action you can take in the visual novel, We Know the Devil. The one verb is to exclude. This game is about three characters and your choice is which character will be the one left out. We Know the Devil, made by Worst Girl Games and Pillow Fight, has no branching paths beyond picking two winners and one loser.
It's a short game too, You only need to go through the story four times to find all the endings. Even with the Prequel bonus story We Know the Devil will easily take less than three hours to complete. It is small as well in terms of presentation. The characters are represented by a handful of animesque sketches. The backgrounds are scanned photographs. Meanwhile, the soundtrack is all intense brutalist horror mood, it does more work to build the horror than the graphics often can.
We Know the Devil is set in a Christian summer camp in a world very similar to ours. One of our three friends is constantly on her smart phone, DMing a friend about how much this all blows. When drunk enough they can share some Harry Potter fandom (2016 was pre-shitbag JK Rowling). Still there are key differences. This is a world where you can summon God himself with the right radio frequency. Radios run on some kind of magic crystals. It is also one where the Devil is hiding in the woods, waiting to take you.
As you can imagine, Christian summer camp sucks. Our three leads are the three "worst" kids in the camp. We Know the Devil is a game of exclusion, so we start with the kids already most excluded. They are Jupiter, the "good" girl who is heavily repressing her sexuality, Neptune, the tomboyish bad girl who is not taking anybody's shit, and Venus, a quiet insecure boy with a secret bitchy streak. The camp councilor is an asshole whose life lessons are mostly passive-aggressive rants about friendships that failed. Again, his world is predicated on division, those in and those out. The "best" campers are petty bullies that nobody actually likes. Neptune, Venus, and Jupiter all have to share a night alone in an isolated rotting cabin. As punishment for their sins, they must confront the Devil.
We Know the Devil takes place over the course of that one night. This is a great spooky premise. Trap the heroes in a bad place, and let the creeping paranoia do most of the work. The Devil's approach is marked by sirens all through the camp, which get louder as the night progresses. The nightmare seems like it will happen at any time.
Yet mostly it doesn't. The devil mostly is not here. Instead We Know the Devil is about killing time. You do teenager shit like try out bad alcohol or play games or make-out. (The characters regret not being able to play Euchre, which apparently is a popular card game if you're from a more Midwestern and religious part of the country than I am.) The structure again, is very simple. Only two people can play out a scene, a third must be left out. Two characters grow closer during the night, one grows more isolated.
There's four endings, and you must see the "bad" endings for each character before you unlock the "good" one. In the bad endings, the Devil takes one of our celestial heroes. They then become something else. Some elemental force of incomprehensible power, revealing a truth they have been hiding. As the night progresses, you'll have a good idea who the Devil will take. Venus imagines lights, Jupiter keeps nervously snapping a hair tie on her wrist, and Neptune has worse and worse coughing fits.
The question We Know the Devil wants to ask though, is what actually is a "bad" ending? The transformations are horrifying, but they are often grotesquely beautiful. Venus in particular becomes an angelic being - a Biblical angel, the ones with thousands of ears and whose light is so pure they will burn away sinners. The endings represent a freedom offered to the Taken character that the Godly paths will not offer the other two "surviving" characters.
The God of this world is an radio station chanting frenetic poetry. Listening to it feverishly pour out unhelpful nonsense - then a more helpful weather report - might be possibly the scariest single moment of We Know the Devil. It has no salvation other than repression. You must sacrifice everybody who does not fit the pattern. You can probably guess who is offering a better deal here. The ultimate puzzle of the game is finding out to defeat the terms the game sets out. How do balance the scales so nobody is the sacrifice?
The other big theme of We Know the Devil is sexuality. Neptune and Jupiter have a crush on each other, which is a big no-no for Jesus Camp. One characters is trans, and the game will change their pronouns once they discover this. Their fall to the Devil in one ending is an intense rejection of their given fresh. They pull off their misgendered arms and luxuriate in their new form. It's gross in wonderful ways. JK Rowling will not enjoy where the story goes.
There are scarier visual novels out there. We could be talking about Doki Doki Literature Club or the more violent parts of the Zero Escape or Danganropa series. I hear great things about The House Of Fata Morgana. We Know the Devil is more sweet than horrific. It is three friends bonding over how shitty their summer is, we've all had friendships like that. It is a game that finds joy in self-discovery. This might be our single happiest ending of the month.
Next time we travel to 2017, the year of all of Harvey Weinstein's many crimes being revealed, Little Witch Academia becoming a viable alternative to JK Rowling's fantasia, and our next movie, Anna and the Apocalypse.
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