Burn Her Together
Devour is a cooperative horror-survival game for groups of up to four players, published by Straight Back Games in January 2021.
There are five maps released so far, but at their basic level their concepts are all similar: a high-ranking cult leader has managed to find a way to summon the archdemon Azazel. Unfortunately, things don't go as planned, and Azazel ends up possessing said cult leader instead.
Now it is up to you (if playing solo) or your team (if playing co-op) of fellow cultists to exorcise Azazel from its host before it becomes too powerful, and drags you back to Hell with it.
Despite its similar name, it has absolutely nothing to do with the movie Devour.
The game provides examples of:
- Combat Resuscitation: Can be done via First Aid kit. Luckily all maps have many of these scattered around.
- Cult: The player characters, as well as the poor sod possessed by Azazel, are all part of a cult of demon worshippers called the Watchers of Azazel.
- Demonic Possession: Tends to happen when high-ranking cultists keep on trying to summon Azazel without properly remembering the complete ritual.
- In the backstory established in the Town update, this happens to the residents of Mercy, the titular town, when they uncover a ritual to summon Azazel while mining and perform it under the misguided belief that it will bring prosperity to the mining colony. They instead become the founders of the Watchers of Azazel.
- Evil Cripple: The flunky demons that show up in the Asylum are themed as these.
- Eye of Newt: Each area's banishing ritual needs some sort of animal to be caught and sacrificed to complete it. In the Farmhouse it was live goats, the Asylum has rats, and the Slaughterhouse has pigs.
- The Inn map bucks the trend, in that it requires instead giant spider eggs, which are promptly desecrated before being burned as offerings.
- The Town map adds extra wrinkles to the progression of the game by having the players curse books in different locations around the map before bringing the cursed books up to the local church to burn them. Only certain books will be able to be cursed at any time, with more becoming available as the player or players burn the books available to them.
- Humanoid Abomination: Anyone possessed becomes one of these, only getting worse and worse as time passes. The Evil Cripple demons in the Asylum and the crawling creatures in the Farmhouse also count, with the former taking the shape of hideous, wheelchair-bound inmates and the latter manifesting as macabre zombie-like entities, both instances being evil demonic creatures serving the Big Bad of the level they’re in.
- Increasingly Lethal Enemy: It's a good idea to try to complete the banishing ritual sooner rather than later, as the minion demons in the area as well as the possessed boss (Anna, Molly, Zara, Sam, and Nathan) get progressively faster when they are on the hunt, and much much more resistant to the effects of the UV flashlights.
- Neck Snap: If Sam, the threat of the Town map, catches you, he immediately snaps your neck and sends you to Hell, where you have to fend off a set amount of Ghouls before you can be brought back to the land of the living.
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Nintendo Hard: Similar to Pacify, playing in single player means you're one person doing the work of four players, and if you get incapacitated it's immediate game over as there's no one around to revive you. - One-Hit-Point Wonder: It only takes one hit for Azazel's host to incapacitate you. The associated flunky creatures in each map (eg. zombie crawlers, spiders, and ghouls) require multiple hits to kill you, and you can kill them with your UV light.
- The Town plays with this, as Sam can still kill you upon making physical contact with you like the other possessed, but he also has a gun that he can shoot you with from a distance which isn't a one-hit kill. Getting shot does, however, make you move much slower, and can easily create an opening for Sam to run up and kill you unless he gets distracted. The only time his gun attack plays this trope straight is if he had caught you while in passive mode.
- Purely Aesthetic Gender: One may play either as a male or female cultist, though this does not influence gameplay in any way.
- Skill Scores and Perks: Introduced in the Inn update, these are unlocked over the course of playing the game, and can be purchased via Ritual Tokens. They give minor but useful modifications to gameplay, like being able to run faster, revive faster, or even see items through walls.
- Run or Die: A very valid tactic especially once the batteries for the UV flashlights run low. The Inn map even adds convenient cabinets for a cultist to hide in once the demons start hunting for them.
- Ritual Magic: Involved in the cause of all the trouble and the resolution for each map.
- Banishing Ritual: What the players have to complete in order to get rid of Azazel and its minions.
- Imperfect Ritual: What causes the mess in the Farmhouse map to begin with — Anna starts out with the aim of controlling Azazel, but because she makes one too many mistakes, instead gets possessed by the demon.
- Transformation of the Possessed: The people Azazel possess gradually look less and less human the longer the players take in gathering the ritual materials.
- Tsuchigumo and Jorogumo: The demons and possessed cultist, Zara, in the Inn stage are themed after these.
- Too Dumb to Live: The goal of the Watchers Of Azazel is to summon and control demons, yet those who actually try it only prove themselves to be adept at botching the ritual and getting possessed, with the others being left to clean up the resulting mess afterwards. So far the Watchers have screwed up five times, and yet the individual cult members keep trying the goddamn ritual instead of getting a new job.
- The player characters count as well, given that they keep showing up to scenes of their possessed friends with nothing to defend themself with but a UV flashlight when the opening cutscenes establish that the players show up expecting the worst at each location. Exaggerated in the Town, where guns are strewn all around the map, along with an ammo depot as one of the featured buildings, and the players don't think to use them to incapacitate Sam, who himself does have a gun that he can shoot you with.
- Unexplained Recovery: The ending cutscene to each level shows Azazel's host being destroyed/dragged off to Hell along with the demon, yet in the next level they're back among the roster of player characters as though nothing had happened.
- Weaksauce Weakness: It turns out demons are weak to UV flashlights. Subverted however, in that the longer the players take to finish the ritual to banish Azazel, the more resistant the demons become to it.
