case by case apocrypha: of the devil episode 1, pt. 1
Welcome back, friends and enemies, to Case by Case Apocrypha, the series in which we are currently playing through of the Devil. We did Episode 0 last week, and this week we're starting in on Episode 1! There will be spoilers below, for reals.
Conveniently, this episode has a pretty clean break partway through so I could not only take a break and not stay up until 2 am finishing it up but also even do a writeup that didn't feel incomplete! I love that for me.
There's a lot of story and worldbuilding so far here--we find out that our beloved protagonist Morgan was good pals with the technological wunderkind David Asher who is apparently basically the father of modern androids (they aren't AI, you aren't allowed to call them AI, AI are illegal), and also that he is apparently dead now. The cops have ruled it a suicide and we've been bullied by Serra, the secret AI child he has manufactured in his basement, into defending him from the suicide charge So we also get to learn a lot about the Noble megacorp that makes all the androids, and about androids, and some other stuff.
All of this information1 feels pretty well-paced with (and relevant to) the investigation we're doing, as we try to find evidence that our pal did not, in fact, kill himself, and in general piece together the final days of his life (we were too busy doing serial murders to really hang out with our friends recently). And since this isn't Japanifornia, the country in which we all live and with which we all have intimate familiarity, it makes sense to spend some time really teaching us about it, but seriously, while there is obviously a fair bit of "hey this is the world we live in" going on.2
After we've investigated all we can, we don't really have much of a clearer picture of what's going on--just some encrypted files of security footage that we have not yet been able to decrypt and a lot of pieces of evidence that honestly all seem like they point towards "yeah, David died by suicide"--we get our first actual honest-to-God trial segment of the game. It feels in many ways like a refinement of the Ace Attorney trial formula.
It's interesting where it differs. There are "call the witness out on testimony that contradicts the evidence" segments where you are given the opportunity to select one of a hand of evidence cards to present; by default this has a timer turned on, but that instantly annoyed me and I just went into options to turn it off. There's no penalty for turning it off so, y'know, I ain't complaining here. (Probably wouldn't enable it by default if it's me but maybe some people really like that sense of time pressure, of feeling like you have to call it out in real time and already know what you're going to say? I'd say let me know in the comments but you and I both know I'm way too lazy to set up comments.)
Then there are "press the witness" segments--these are now separate from the "interact with their testimony" segments and feel more like they are your witness, where you get to ask them questions. These are styled as a blackjack, where you are trying to press to gain as much information as you can without pressing too much (either by asking the wrong questions or just continuing to press when you already have everything you need). I think this may finally have succeeded at what the Ace Attorney games are trying to accomplish with the "penalize you for pressing on the wrong statements" segments; it makes you think about what you're doing rather than just spamming it, but you aren't actively punished for slipping up (unless it is the sort of slip-up that actively hurts your case). I've only had a few opportunities to interact with this but it feels good so far.
Anyway. Most of the case is us stalling for time while we wait for our new AI companion to decrypt the surveillance footage that will exonerate our late client; we do finally get some breakthroughs that really seem like they are going to win the day for us when Serra announces that she's encrypted the files, and, gambler that we are, we submit that footage without looking over it. And we're right! It shows that he did not secretly poison himself! Instead it appears to show that our new android companion did.
That seems bad.
It looks like we have won, that all we need to do is have Serra decommissioned and incinerated and we'll have discharged the favor we owed David, and then Morgan decides, because she sees something of herself in this AI--someone who was just "born wrong", someone who spent her life trying to learn how to be human despite the conviction that it is simply not possible for her--to defend Serra from these charges of murder, putting her career on the line in the process.
And that's where I have chosen to leave it off! I honestly didn't know what to expect from this--while this is clearly Ace Attorney-inspired3, I wouldn't have been shocked if it ended up that, no, actually there was no murder here, we just get a bleak introspective mostly narrative case and lose the court battle.4 But they did the classic Ace Attorney twist; there are stakes now. We have a client (well, "client") who isn't dead; our career is on the line. Our friend was murdered, and the court won't settle for anything less than finding the actual culprit, given that our "client" isn't an actual person and so doesn't benefit from the presumption of innocence. (Also, they have the presumption of innocence in this legal system!)
Anyway. I'm excited for the conclusion of this episode next week; this game rules. Very glad I finally got around to starting this.
I hate the word lore.↩
Also--and this is a mechanic they introduced in Episode 0--the fact that you get a small bit of Number Goes Up for reading articles and then getting the correct takeaway from them is such a brilliant way to get people to engage with the bits of worldbuilding you have lying around. Extra bonus points that reading articles unlocks special dialog options later on sometimes.↩
There's even a classic "ladder vs stepladder" conversation with robo-Maya.↩
I wasn't expecting that but I wouldn't have been surprised, either.↩