Mason Pilevsky, 05 January 2025

DevilsGame,by Michael Wolk, self describes itself as, “a 24-hour tsunami of hacking horrors [which] rocks the world in an unprecedented, interactive e-book format that changes the game.” Through the format of reading text messages, political announcements, church sermons, and secretly recorded conversation transcripts, DevilsGame simultaneously pieces together the apocalyptic end of the world and the new hope of unlikely love between protagonists Claire Bodine and Nathan Rifkin. The experience was formatted in short, chronologically ordered segments, each of which contained two different colored links: red links that were internal and provided quick information, and purple links that led to more information on external websites.

The game was meant to feel as though you as the reader were piecing together evidence and getting updates in real time about a story unfolding in the world around you that you were unable to change or influence. There was no tangible interactive element in the sense that you as the reader could not make choices or influence the game. The interactive part was more of an internal feeling when real life figures were included where the reader started to think about intentions, the end of the world, and feel themselves interact with the helplessness of what has happened and what could happen with all of the data we have unthinkingly signed away to cyber companies. We have allowed access to our personal lives and devices in irrevocable ways. The reader starts to wonder about what could happen to us if giving our data to these smart phones was not a smart idea.

It then calls into question the idea of morality and sin. If everyone is freaking out about their sexual escapades being seen by the world or their communications being exposed, does that make everybody sinful, or does it normalize the fact that we’ve been looking down on certain concepts and ideas that are perfectly healthy and normal? What if it is our definitions of the end of the world and the lack of guidance piecing together meaning from the data points we do have, that is wrong?

This new, e-book format most closely resembled manga, with its feeling of infinite chapters and self contained stories. Regarding the e-book itself, I enjoyed the story but I found the format switching hard to follow at first because of the monochromatic nature of the text messages. It took me a while to realize that each series of texts were the same two people, and would have appreciated a color coding for information from politicians versus clergy. Though I understand that difficulty knowing who to trust was part of the concept, for me, when playing in pieces, having everything look some variation of greyscale made it harder for me to connect the puzzle pieces.

I played the first part of the game in a somewhat asynchronous manner— starting and stopping when convenient for me. In this manner, I was able to follow the story, but I did not have the same sense of building suspense and energy that I felt when I “binged” scene 4 to the end. While having the ability to start and stop whenever I wanted to felt counterintuitive to this particular story— if I had been forced to read it in real time, I would have felt the surprise and excitement very acutely— it would have been the literary equivalent of an escape room. It would literally feel sensational to do this kind of philosophical experiment as an experience in real time.

Though not a particularly complicated story or concept, DevilsGame provides plenty of fodder for thought about how we receive information, who we blame for our circumstances, and how forces we have strong feelings about can turn and save us. Its best feature is not the story or the format, but the philosophical questions it leaves us struggling with. Though imperfect and improvable, I hope DevilsGame helps readers become independent thinkers, instead of the dangerous entities of the game within the game.

Check out the e-book at: https://try.devilsgame.com

I reviewed this e-book as a member of the press.