VN Talk: Kiss the Demiurge

In which I talk (write) about visual novels from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: Windows (also on Mac and Linux)
Release: 2022

Kiss the Demiurge is an unusual visual novel for me to play since it's yuri (lesbian romance) and usually if I look for a romance game I gravitate towards otome or RPGs with romance elements. But the developer of KtD, Studio YuriEureka, asked if I would cover it on my blog and provided a free copy of the game. It looked to be a supernatural themed plot and I like to try out indie games when I can, so I agreed.

The game follows Minori, a girl who accidentally made a contract with a demon as a child, costing her her parents, and the experience has forged her into a harsh and uncompromising teenager who works for a secret organization to hunt demons. She's actually a bit of a pill in the opening moments of the game, being so uptight that it borders on caricature, but surprisingly her zeal in saving the muggles from the realities of magic is exactly what makes her entertaining.

This game was released within the past year and is still fairly new, so this is a fair warning that this post will include spoilers after the cut.

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I'll be frank that it took a little while for me to get into this game. Aside from the unpolished sprite and background art, Minori is just so… uncompromising in her self-loathing and her mission to protect the world from demons and magic that I liked the first other character that shows up in the game's present day; a demon who gives her some sass.

It gets better once she transfers to her new school and meets the magic club members. She wants to make sure the girls don't actually have magic (they don't, they just have their own reasons for wanting to believe they have powers) and then force them to give up any pursuit of magic before they accidentally form a contract with a demon and end up getting killed.

Minori believes she is doing a good thing even if her methods are harsh, and joins the club as a "helpful" new member so she can learn more about how she can blackmail them into quitting. This results in a lot of Minori saying something nice aloud while her internal monologue is seething and calling the other girls "degenerates." It's pretty entertaining when her missions get disrupted by the club members not behaving as anticipated and she has to adapt.

But I didn't really like that my primary enjoyment of the early part of the story was watching the protagonist get foiled. She does such a good job of beating herself up over the disappearance of her parents, hiding everything from her grandfather, and lying and manipulating the other club members, that it's hard to actually be sympathetic to her. She believes she deserves any pain she gets, and she brings it up so often you want her to get over herself.

As expected (since this is a yuri game so some romance needs to happen), eventually Minori starts softening towards the girl she decides to investigate first and becomes conflicted about fulfilling her mission and ruining the dreams of a person she has come to care about, which sets up the twist.

And this is where the game really grabbed my attention.

I probably should have realized it ahead of time, since I noticed that for a supposed mage Minori hardly ever used magic even when things arguably could have been done in front of other people without drawing attention to herself. Minori, like her fellow magic club members, has been engaging in a delusion that she can use magic, but magic is not real.

She arrives at this point when she tries to convince her love interest to quit the club, which they are willing to do if she can provide proof, which it turns out she can't, because everything from her powers to her secret organization has been entirely in her head.

I don't know why her false reality suddenly breaks over this (her brain can't make up a plausible lie to continue when someone else doesn't buy it?), but this strikes a transformation in Minori which suddenly makes this a very different sort of game that isn't about saving the world from demons one girl at a time.

Minori essentially created her mage powers and the secret organization as a coping mechanism to explain the loss of her mother, who she accidentally pushed off a cliff during a fight as a child when she didn't want to go home. Pretending she had magicked her parents away to another world was preferable to facing reality, since if they were in another world, there was still the potential to eventually bring them back.

But she also has to deal with the fallout all her years of delusion has cost her. Her grandfather spent the last ten years and most of his savings paying private detectives to find his missing daughter (her mother), and he passes away before Minori comes to her senses. Even when he was alive, Minori felt terrible about how her grandfather was pursuing leads that would never pan out. Once she is forced to deal with the truth, she realizes the final years of his life could have been spent enjoying his retirement and the hobbies he gave up in pursuit of his daughter.

Minori has done a lot of awful things, but when this all comes crashing down on her, she finally becomes relatable. She has regrets, she feels terrible, and she can't even tell herself it was for the greater good anymore. I particularly liked her on Tomoko's route, because when she's helping the other girl with her own problems, Minori can truthfully tell Tomoko how she still has a chance to fix things for the better in a way Minori no longer can.

How Minori's story plays out varies a bit depending on the love interest, but generally, no matter which girl she winds up with, this is a story about two damaged people discovering how to heal through their mutual affection for each other (with Akane being the exception and probably the only girl who doesn't need an appointment with a therapist). I felt like the pacing was a bit off, particularly my first time through, but it's always a happy ending, even if the path to it can be rocky.

I romanced Tomoko first, so at the time I didn't realize how the game was structured. Most of the game is the common route, with specific scenes appearing depending on the love interest before merging back into the shared story. So when Minori discovered she had been lying to herself the whole time, I thought that was the climax of the game. It was such a big twist. So I was expecting a denouement, with Minori realizing she could move on and that she could have a relationship with Tomoko. Then the game kept going. And going.

Clearly Tomoko had some figurative demons that needed to be exorcized (since she also has a massive guilt complex over a family member's death), but it took so long for Minori to actually confront Tomoko over the fact that her sister's ghost was about as real as Minori's secret organization. When she finally gets Tomoko to realize the truth, and all seems well with the pair, there's barely any time to breathe before it's over and before we're dropped back to the main menu.

Chitori's route was the same way. Since I already knew the twist, I was better prepared to expect most of the second half of the game to be focused on Chitori and her particular issues, and this one had a much better build up since we have a chance to see Chitori become increasingly determined to face her social anxiety, but it still ends abruptly after their mutual confession, and never explains the mysterious events like who was calling Minori or knocking on the door since those were the greatest sources of tension unique to Chitori's romance.

I played Akane's romance last, and she has a similarly rushed ending like the other two, but she ended up a breath of fresh air. Despite being the most outwardly pro-magic character in the game, she's a relatively normal girl. She has trouble studying and is a little too willing to give up on an academic future, but I liked that despite all her proclamations about magic, it's pretty clear that she understands all of it is just a wishful fantasy. I get the feeling that even if she had never met Minori she would have been okay, which I couldn't say for the other girls.

Compared to most of the other romance games I've covered here, Kiss the Demiurge has a more centralized story. Even after selecting a love interest, there are multiple shared scenes that will happen across all routes, so the school festival will always play out the same way, Minori's grandfather will always die, and so on. This makes sense to some degree, since the larger world shouldn't change much based on her decisions and she's a student so her day to day life follows a familiar routine, but it does give the game less replay value.

There are three girls, but by the second one I was starting to see the bones of the story, because the individual scenes always had to weave back and rejoin the shared ones. If I wasn't playing all the girls back to back this probably wouldn't have bothered me as much since I would likely reread the shared scenes to refresh my memory, but I was using the skip function to skip previously read text, so the new scenes came in highly specific segments, where a particular element of the plot was advanced a particular way.

For instance, Minori would go to the other girl's home to look for blackmail material. The details might differ in how she gets there, but it felt very regimented; this is the pretending to give away a secret scene, this is the blackmail scene, this is the discussing the truth about her dad scene, etc. (Though, I did like that each route gave a different explanation for what probably happened to her dad. We never learn the truth, but I think the ambiguity works in the narrative's favor.)

So even though each girl's scene is unique, it feels like we're more or less seeing variations of the same thing. There's never a route where Minori doesn't postpone blackmailing a girl because she feels bad, because that means she wouldn't have a birthday party in the club room and that's one of the scenes that happens in every route.

I've seen a few indie romance VNs do this before, where they have a single central story that weaves the romance scenes in between parts of the main plot, because it's a good way to take a set amount of words and make a long single playthrough that feels meaty instead of having 3-5 much shorter routes with completely individualized content that the player may never complete. The script for KtD is already longer than most novels, so I completely understand why a dev team with a single writer would go this route.

If you really like the girls, playing through three times to see all the endings is probably going to be worth it, but there's not much reason to play an additional time if you're lukewarm on someone. The only big twist is Minori's delusion and that comes up on every route, so subsequent playthroughs lose that element of surprise and the only other truth to be discovered is what problem the love interest is dealing with.

That said, Kiss the Demiurge was a pleasant surprise. The writing can be rough and uneven in patches, but it has an emotional heart and I teared up in a couple places on Tomoko's route. I really did not expect a game examining the lies we tell ourselves in what I thought was going to be a game about magic and demons.