Distant, powerful, and likely unsettling gods are looking to you for ritual and devotion. At least, you think they are. It’s hard to say if your calls ever reach them.
DEVOTIONALIA follows a high priest going about their daily tasks and preparing votives, sacrifices, and rituals. You need to pick the details of many of these tasks, which might be a challenge seeing as you aren’t exactly a part of their cult. Or are you? I guess it was presumptuous of me to assume you weren’t. Well, I didn’t have any idea of what I was doing, and had to feel my way through the rituals and prayers on my own.
There is a gloom to the writing, yet an incredible sense of imaginary worlds constructing themselves around you. The language and style swaddles you in the meaning and life of this cult, accepting its reality and carrying you along with it. I didn’t feel like I knew what I was doing while preparing the rituals, but the writing quickly makes you feel that maybe you’re more familiar with these things than you think. It’s quite stunning to suddenly find yourself connected with something so alien and distant.
I may have said I didn’t know what I was doing, yet I still felt like I had an idea on what to do because the writing sets a mood that naturally seems to carry you through the ritual. It mingled this sense of cluelessness and familiarity, which I feel often comes when calling out to the gods in any religion. You know, but do you really? Yet you know.
DEVOTIONALIA is playable now on itch.io.
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