GOGathon: The Devil Got Overindulgent Here

So, we’ve come to the end of our reviews of the Devil Came Through Here trilogy, and as with all the reviews in the series a ton of content warnings apply. I’m not going to give an exhaustive one for the game, not least because I can’t 100% guarantee that I’ve seen all the content in the game, but this review has content warnings for suicide, abuse, abuse, abuse, more abuse, abuse and abuse.

Lorelai is the story of, well, Lorelai, an 18 year old who arrives home from her job at a nursing home to bear the stress of her hideous family life. Lorelai’s father died of cancer when she was 12, and whilst Lorelai’s a survivor by instinct and has by and large kept it together in the intervening six years, her mother has largely gone to pieces.

In particular, she’s struck up a relationship with John Doe, our antagonist for the game. John’s an Afghanistan war veteran who hasn’t remotely adjusted to civilian life, especially after his job at a brick factory vanished when the factory shut down, and he divides his time between violently abusing Lorelai’s mother and being extremely creepy towards Lorelai. He’s glued himself into the family fabric in part by siring a child with Lorelai’s mother, little Bethany, and Lorelai’s intent on keeping her head down and earning enough money that she can move out and take Bethany with her, since it’s evident that her mother just can’t bring herself to leave John.

This dreadful night, however, Lorelai becomes concerned when her mother locks herself in the bathroom and won’t come out or respond. With the aid of the boy next door, Zack, who has a very obvious crush on her and who she may or may not have a crush on in turn, Lorelai forces her way into the bathroom to discover that her mother has hung herself. John shows up, laughs at the situation, and then ends up brutally assaulting Zack and slashing Lorelai’s throat open with a broken bottle.

That’s when the Queen of Maggots gives Lorelai an opportunity much like she offered to Susan in The Cat Lady: a sort of immortality which would allow her to come back and keep trying until she can defeat John and, if not save her family from him, at least stop others suffering at his hands. Lorelai’s processes of resurrection will prove to be a bit more involved than Susan’s, however, for the Queen is grooming Lorelai to one day succeed her…

GOGathon: The Devil Checked In Here

Joe and Ivy Davis are a married couple whose relationship is on the rocks. In a bid to get away from it all, Joe’s arranged for them to have a lovely seaside holiday at a quiet coastal town, where the only accommodation on offer is from the Quiet Haven Hotel. Once Joe and Ivy arrive, however, they find that the hotel is a bit of a shambles – and Ivy’s behaving and talking in an incredibly strange manner, alternating between total silence and incoherently talking about things only she can see. To make matters worse, a terrible storm has blown in, so strong heading out into the downpour to seek help isn’t a sensible option.

Joe and Ivy go up to their hotel room and have a tense conversation about their problems, before going to sleep. When they wake up, Ivy’s nowhere to be seen. When he goes down to the hotel restaurant to look for her, thinking she might have gone to breakfast ahead of him, he finds the hotel manager standing in the midst of a bizarre tableau. She informs him that Ivy made the mistake of angering a certain Sophie, another guest in the hotel, but that if he hurries he might be able to persuade Sophie to let Ivy go.

And it’s around then that things go full Eraserhead. (With additional content warnings for issues of murder, mental health, eating disorders, and utter tripped-out mayhem.)

GOGathon: The Devil Meowed Through Here

Harvester Games is an indie development studio whose efforts are largely driven by the efforts of main game designer, programmer and writer Remigiusz Michalski, who’d cut his teeth producing Downfall – A Horror Adventure Game using the baseline Adventure Game Studio development environment before attempting more ambitious works. The main crop of Harvester so far has been the Devil Came Through Here trilogy – named for a phrase that recurs throughout the series – consisting of The Cat Lady, a spruced-up remake of Downfall with some plot and writing tweaks to make it fit the themes of the overall trilogy better, and the recently-released Lorelai.

Just lately, I finally got around to giving The Cat Lady a proper try, having bought it for cheap in a GOG sale a while back and forgotten it was there. As far as setting the tone for the rest of the trilogy goes, it certainly makes a powerful aesthetic statement: eerie, often-monochrome graphics paired with a soundtrack from Remigiusz’s brother Michal makes sure that what the aesthetic lacks in polish it more than makes up for in atmosphere.

It also really aggressively pushes themes of suicide, nihilism, murder, death, depression, and general misery at you from the beginning. So, you know, content warnings for all of that apply to the rest of the review.