Spoilers for the visual novel Demons Within
Download the game yourself from here: https://sleths.itch.io/demons-within
So, lately I have been playing Demons Within and I wanted to write down some thoughts. The basic premise of the game is that there is a war between the civilized world and the demon worshipping Red-eyes. The story begins when the main character, Resnick, a soldier of the Dawnbreak Order, gets possessed by one of these demons during a battle against Red-eyes and he has to first figure out what has happened to him and then learn to deal with the situation.
At first I thought that the setting of this story is rather simple: good guys, the Dawnbreak Order, fights against the bad guys, the Red-eyes. But as the story proceeds it turns out that the story is not just as black and white as I first thought. Sure, the Red-eyes are causing damage and killing people but the Dawnbreak Order is not as pure and righteous as it seems on the surface, or what Resnick believes.
For centuries the Dawnbreak Order has protected the borders and cities of the civilized world and pushed back the Red-eyes to the inhospitable Marshlands from where they conduct their raids against the villages in the Outskirts. The Red-eyes are described as “savages” with “violent nature” who “reject the civilized world and seem to hate everyone who partakes in its orderly and peaceful ways” and summon demons “through foul rituals.” This alone gives an image that the Dawnbreak Order is a part of a colonialistic and genocidal empire who produce vast amounts of propaganda to villainize the tribes they try to eradicate. Even the higherups of the Order speak of plans to cull the Red-eye population.
The Dawnbreak Order itself is very tightly interwoven into every facet of the civilized world. I’m not exactly sure if they are the direct rulers of the realm or is there a separate monarch/ruler but at least they are the army and the city guard in any major settlement and they are very well funded and with these means they support many seemingly non-military aspects of normal people's life. This leads to the situation where the normal people have very high regards towards the Order. They directly support many orphanages because many children are left orphaned due to the Red-eye raids and it is said that many of these orphans later join the Order because they are inspired by their constant support, this includes Sam, a friend of Resnick and a fellow soldier. In addition to that, the Order funds local libraries which are full of adventure novels where valiant Dawnbreak soldiers fight against the evil savages or poor thief joins the order to become a respected hero. Many of these books are directly written by the Order personnel and Resnick was said to read many of these books in his youth and they directly inspired him to join the Order. Even during the events of the game, Resnick visits a library to browse new volumes to read in his free time. Due to this admiration towards the Order, Resnick can’t see any negative sides in the propaganda and colonialism and he truly believes that he is doing the right thing. For now.
This is the main theme that currently interests me in this game: the world is not as black and white as it seems and I’m waiting for Resnick to realize that he might not be the good guy he thought he was.
The main plot driving agent in the story is the titular Demon within Resnick and how it affects Resnick’s decisions. As a matter of fact we, the readers, are reading the story from the point of view of the demon who has access to Resnick’s emotions and memories. The demon can influence the emotions of Resnick and people near him which acts as a decision points for us readers, if we want to influence these emotions or not. The thing is that the demon possessing Resnick is a Lust demon and in the beginning can influence only lust in people, though we will learn to control more emotions as the story progresses. This leads into many horny situations where it’s not exactly clear if any of the participants, Resnick included, is completely in control of the situation and if they really want it or if they would have done it without the influence of the demon. It was mentioned in the opening screen of the game that it is exploring the concept of dubious consent, which is a topic I haven’t seen much in furry visual novels and I’m interested to see where this leads. We are currently in the point of the story where Resnick begins to learn about the fact that he is turning into a Red-eye and there already are suspicions surrounding him which leads his own brother betraying his trust by investigating Resnick’s condition behind his back.
In conclusion: I’m interested in the themes of this story and I want to see if the evils of the Dawnbreak Order are revealed and how it affects Resnick, and what the Red-eyes truly are and if they are as evil as they are portrayed as. The writing of this story is generally pretty well done, though I feel that the horny scenes are many and they tend to drag way too long compared to the non-horny scenes in between.
