#thomas mack

“It’s a mistake to anthropomorphize humans” is a really good opening line. For one thing, it sets the tone that the PC uses throughout the game—cynical, worldly, experienced, a little superior, just a little didactic. Completely appropriate for a "memoir of a demonic spy in the Cold War between Heaven and Hell,” as the description has it. For another thing, it sets just the right note of “something is different here” with a basic logical disconnect: how can the narrator say one shouldn’t anthropomorphize humans? Aren’t humans already anthropomorphic? By definition, even?

So it’s a clever, fun-to-play, puzzly bit of parser IF that tells a well-controlled story that gradually opens up the scope of the investigation, as a good detective story should: at first, you arrive at the casino seeking only to discover why another demonic operative has abandoned (what you know at or near the beginning of the game to be) a camouflaged outpost for Our Side, but discover, in the course of your investigation, that much more is at stake: there’s a plot afoot by Heaven’s zealots to turn the cold war hot, and it becomes your job to investigate that plot and put a stop to it.

The writing stays wonderful throughout: snarky, weary, knowing, just a little tired; then, after the middle game, increasingly alarmed at what’s happening. The tone is spot-on throughout. The basic puzzle mechanic is clever, too: the conceit is that, since you are a spiritual being, you cannot interact with (most) physical objects and need to manipulate humans into doing so by giving them motivations (verbs, roughly, although things are of course not that simple), and “manners” (adverbs, roughly). This is an unusual form of indirection, and it basically works quite well, although some of the puzzles are rather fiendish, and there are places where I wish they were less fiddly.

For me, it was the puzzle hardness and some small bits of implementation wonkiness that kept this from moving up to being an unqualified ten: the puzzle involving manipulating the diplomats into coming to a peace treaty was difficult, because the motivations for the three of them were opaque; and the usually-excellent built-in hint system almost seemed to be actively misleading in this case: nothing I did based on the hints managed to get the diplomats to come to a deal, and I had to take another tack entirely to solve the problem. (This was the only place where the built-in hint system failed me, though. It also was enough to get through the endgame’s final puzzle, though it was a little vague there, too.)

But all in all, this was wonderful: challenging without being impossible, puzzly without sacrificing narrative, story-based and well-written, with a dozen and a half or so well-implemented NPCs. My biggest complaint, overall, is that there wasn’t more game, and I really hope that Sidewinder the demon shows up in a sequel.

Overall score: 9/10.