In The Light Of Death The Demon Cries
A downloadable game
CONTENT WARNING:
This game features the following concepts and themes: demons, fatal violence, the killing of innocents, grief, betrayal, death, and inescapable evil. While this game focuses on the light of hope at the core of despair, these themes should be carefully considered and may cause distress or be triggering.
This Is A Game You Play Alone
This game offers you the chance to create your own story of horror, despair, regret, and sin. You will create your demon, onerecovered memory at a time. The Demon may find redemption, or they may be finally consumed by a hell of their own making.
The Demon is dying. There is no coming back from that.
This isn’t about overcoming death. This is about finding humanity, and creating, or denying, a path to salvation and forgiveness.
Will your Demon rediscover their humanity and recover bittersweet memories, accepting reincarnation?
Or will they spend their last moments cursing humanity, waiting for hell to claim what’s left of their soul?
Or does another fate await them?
The Inspiration
This story game’s main inspiration is the anime series Demon Slayer (Kimetsu no Yaiba, 鬼滅の刃). The story’s protagonist, Tanjiro Kamado, shows great compassion and mercy to the demons he kills. He kills them to protect innocents and stop their reign of terror. But he understands that these demons were humans once, and have lost their way.
I created this game to reflect the moments of haunting humanity we see as the demon dies. We see glimpses of the demon’s life as a human, their slow and terrible corruption, and the unanswered question: what awaits the demon in death?
I offer this game to you, to create your own story of horror and answer the question: what does redemption ask for?
This game is based on the Wretched & Alone system, and was made for the Wretched & Alone Jam!
The Game
To play this game you will need a tarot deck and a tumbling blocks tower. You can play with a free phone app or website if you don't have access to those.
To play simply draw from your tarot deck and refer to the memory oracle. As the memories are uncovered, record these memories and how your Demon feels about them. Some of these memories are powerful, and will bring Death closer, asking you to pull from the tower. Each question you are asked will help you create a beautiful story.
When the tower falls, your Demon dies.
Depending on what cards you pulled, a specific ending awaits your Demon, open to your interpretation.
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $10 USD. You will get access to the following files:
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Comments
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Demon Cries is based on The Wretched - another very good game - and inspired by the anime Demon Slayers. Specifically the moments where a demon has been exorcised and manages to glimpse all of its old memories of human life.
DC takes the inevitable failure of the The Wretched's framework, and makes it far less desperate, and far more melancholic and dreamlike. The tumbling tower deck will always fall, but as you build to that moment (and also your demon's final moments) you create a story that is equal parts horror as it is tragic. The entire layout and art helps create that soft, dreamlike quality that old, once-forgotten memories have. Uncovering these memories drives the game forward as you draw prompts from a deck of tarot cards.
The prompts themselves can weave a beautiful story of both violence and sadness. The memories you uncover touch on all different facets of your old life; perhaps a bloody rise to power followed by old childhood memories that draw a single tear.
Despite the darker subject matter, there is a kindness to this game. Not only in the safety section but also in how the game inevitably ends. Once the tower has fallen, depending on the cards you had drawn, you leave something with the exorcist who slew you.
The exorcist recognized the last vestige of humanity within you, which set you on this path of final rediscovery. And as a final kindness, you might give them knowledge, magic, hope. The final *final* prompt deals solely with the exorcist and how they have been changed, and what their fate might hold. I can see how a player would thread together multiple playthroughs using the same exorcist. Watching them change and develop, alongside all the new demons they face. Several of the regular prompts also bring the exorcist into the scene as they become an active player in your own revelations. Which I thought was just very cool.
In the Light of Death the Demon Cries is a really special game. I played a little bit of it before writing this up, and the prompts are incredibly compelling at weaving together a story of reflective tragedy.
An amazing game that focuses on easily one of the best parts of Demon Slayer and makes it even better!
Cannot wait to try it out.
aaaaaa I can't wait to hear about it! 😭❤️✨
I've just played it and loved how evocative your writing was! I was sold on the game and excited to play it just by reading the first page!
Drawing from past experiences and wondering which ones could breed a *lot* of resentment and turn somebody into a demon if I twisted them just a little also felt cathartic.
Thank you so much! I'm so glad, that cathartic experience and reflection on difficult emotions (like resentment) is definitely something I was aiming for ❤️❤️❤️
I just cannot get over how astonishingly lovely this game looks.
thank you so much 😭😭😭
I literally killed Affinity Publisher and my RAM with the sheer amount of photo play haha whoops