It's a strange experience to go into a game, fully expecting it to be relatable and then it just... isn't.
This happened to me once before, when I played We Know The Devil.
How do I rate a game like that?

While procrastinating earlier this week I was browsing old Jimquisitions and stumbled across the “100% Objective review”, a video where they make fun of the concept of an objective review. Their original review of Final Fantasy XIII was incredibly negative and they got harassed for it not being “objective” so they made a “review” that was just listing facts. While reading the comments of that video I stumbled across something that really stuck with me. I don’t remember the exact wording, but someone was saying something to the extent of “If you were an English teacher, would you assign grades purely based on whether you like a paper or not? Hopefully not, when grading a paper, you need to put aside personal bias and grade it on the quality of its content. Same for a video game, you’re supposed to subjectively evaluate its features independent of personal bias.”
Putting aside the fact that English papers aren’t art and reviewing isn’t grading, that sentiment strikes me as odd. I don’t rate based on technical execution. A lot of games I have rated very highly have some pretty massive flaws. I sometimes joke that Nier Automata would be an awful game if it wasn’t also my favourite game. My ratings are pretty much exclusively based on how much I enjoyed something.

So, how do I rate Post-Disclosure, Devil’s Knight?
Based solely on enjoyment it’s probably like a 5/10 I guess.
But rating it as such would feel incredibly unfair. It’s not the game’s fault I went into it expecting something it could never deliver on. It’s not the game’s fault my lived experiences are so vastly different from what it’s trying to portray that I don’t relate to anything that is happening.
Besides, aren’t I always annoyed when cis people ignore trans stories because “it wouldn’t be relatable anyway”? Aren’t I being just as bad right now?
And I know this game can be relatable to people. I hope that Roxy relates to it, would be weird otherwise. Kye’s excellent review shows very well just how much this story resonates with her. If I slap a label like “two and a half stars” on this, I feel like I’m invalidating their experiences. Even worse, I might end up scaring someone off this game who would have ended up loving it.

The objective Final Fantasy XIII review has the following line:
“If you buy Final Fantasy XIII and like it, then you like Final Fantasy XIII. If you buy Final Fantasy XIII and you don’t like it, then you don’t like Final Fantasy XIII. It has things in it that some people might enjoy but other people who have different ideas of what is enjoyable may not actually enjoy it.”
As much as that is very obvious satire, it’s pretty much exactly how I feel about PDDK. I personally didn’t like it all that much but I know other people will.
Fortunately, unlike FFXIII, it’s a free game that will only take you 10 minutes to play. So why not give it a try, see if you’ll end up enjoying it? What’s the worst that could happen?

The worst that could happen is that you could end up writing a really weird review about the process of reviewing things and spend over an hour with that apparently.

Reviewed on Sep 25, 2022


1 Comment


1 year ago

I've not played this, it just popped up as a friend on here has played it but I just want to comment I rather like your writing style.