DAEMON MASQUERADE

I always wondered what an Obra Dinn/Golden Idol clone that did everything wrong would look like, and then I found this game. The game starts with this segment that absolutely feels like it's The Author's Poorly-Concealed Fetish, where your character is apparently a child and it feels like you're playing through somebody's weird ageplay fetish. Seriously, you could tell me the artist did a porn game and I would not be surprised in the least. It's got that feel to it. Then you get to the meat of the game, which does a lot of things poorly. One of the founding principles of Obra Dinn and Golden Idol was taking things incrementally: you start by identifying the key recurring characters and then it broadens out into larger scenes where you use what you already know as a starting point to understanding the new stuff. Another thing those games (particularly Golden Idol) did very well was conserving detail to only what was important. In Golden Idol, if you look in someone's pockets, chances are that everything they have is going to be important in some way to identifying them. Daemon Masquerade instead throws everything at you at once. It's Golden Idol by way of Chainsaw Man: Makima has ordered you to investigate six people and find who they are and the demon they're working with, except instead of being able to turn into a chainsaw monster you have Cedric from King's Quest V whose primary power is being annoying. This is where the game starts going downhill. Instead of having you investigate each person separately, you get six pegboards that fill up with evidence at the same time. The game does this even though there's no good reason to: the developer absolutely could've (and should've) structured it so that you investigate one person at a time. Even though you have all six chapters open at once, you can only usually solve one per in-game day and have a seven day time limit. It's not at all obvious where you should start, and instead of collecting words automatically the way you do in Golden Idol, you have to manually underline names on documents to "collect" them. I want to talk about the first person you can actually solve because it's probably the worst one of them all and shows the key failure in the way this game was designed. The first person is a children's book author who has her artist's block solved by her demon, and you're meant to figure this out by matching the art style of the drawings she puts out every day to a catalog of children's books. The problem is that the artist for this game absolutely could not pull that off - I had to look up a guide to figure out how I was supposed to proceed because I could not tell which drawing was meant to be the one: they all looked the same because the artist for the game only has one style. Another problem is that to identify the demons, the game expects you to read through a fake version of the Ars Goetia which has like fifty demons in it. For me, this was the point at which I would've emailed the developer that early 2000s meme of Colin Powell holding up a book and going "Whoa there, do you really expect me to read all that?" Anyway, the game is laughably bad and I might wind up doing a let's play of it at some point just to laugh at it.

不错 不过总是忘记给了的文件肯定有信息

Its extremely fun. Its not very hard the answers are pretty easy to see but the story is what makes the game what it is. I would recommend everyone who enjoys detective games to play this

The story itself feels rushed, while the setting clearly implies something much larger and more slow-paced. Frankly, the game has one major case to solve. You have six suspects, and you need to confirm their identities and the demons associated with them. You have one week to complete the task, and each day gives you more clues. However, most of the cases cannot really be solved until the final days. Because of that, the optimal strategy is basically to sleep through the entire week and solve everything in one go. The additional clues make the cases easier, and by waiting, you know for sure that you have all the information available. So the main gimmick feels kind of weak. Most of the discovery devolves into cross-referencing the demon book to match demon abilities with descriptions, which is boring and unfun. And when the game asks for proof, you mostly just point it in some vague direction, and your assistant connects the dots himself. Solving the puzzles does not create a “gotcha” moment in your mind. Most of them feel more like, “Eh, maybe this?” and then your assistant does the rest.

Fantastic game, and a great entry in the Roottree-like genre. The mechanics are developed well compared to other games' in the genre — in particular, the fact that the evidence changes over time is truly novel. The solves were clever, but I never felt stuck. The story is lively, and uses the supernatural conceit to its fullest. It also has some fun things to say about the nature of power and how it corrupts. The characters are fun to follow through the death game that they all play. The writing is delightful, and in particular it's very fun to read through the large encyclopedia of daemons, even if many of them won't be relevant at all to the story. My only criticism there is that they could've used another proofreading pass for punctuation. A must-play not only for fans of Roottrees, but also just people who want a mystery game. Big thumbs up, and I hope the dev goes on to make more incredible games.

While a bit short (although it depends on your reading speed and how good you are at deductive gameplay), this game is fantastic and I'd love to see more games like it. I also took great joy in drawing loads of big willies and boobies on pictures of famous historical figures

quick but worthwhile. i had fun