The Stack

At the beginning of Demoniak, the player controls one Johnny Sirius, whose half-alien parentage allegedly gives him incredible physical prowess, as he arrives late to a meeting called by Doctor Cortex, an alleged genius with an enormous brain and a stunted body who floats around in a MODOK chair. Cortex has a plan to destroy Demoniak’s portal into our world by building “the Ultimate Bomb”, which involves retrieving things from two planets, which you can visit in either order. By default, the first is the planet Freezyassov, the ice-covered site of a special prison for special prisoners, where we seek a decommissioned war robot named B-52. The warden denies he’s still there, but we know for a fact that he’s lying — I can simply switch control to B-52 and observe that he’s in his cell.

What do you do about this? Well, you have options. There are some ingredients for adventure-game puzzles lying around: a laundry bag containing a guard’s uniform, for example, and some documentation for the various pipes leading from the site’s power plant. Or you could just start fighting everyone. The game’s combat system isn’t very detailed, but it clearly wants you to use it; too many characters are defined in terms of their superlative combat skills for you not to mash them together like action figures. And once you’ve beat up the guards sufficiently, you can take their keys.

Or you can just, y’know, switch control to the guy who has the keys to B-52’s cell and let him out. That’s the simplest solution. It’s not quite as easy as I’m making it sound, because you can only control one guard at a time, and the others sometimes object to what you’re doing. But not nearly as often as you’d think!

I have some slight qualms about this approach. The manual tells me that it’s possible to win the game entirely as Johnny Sirius, without ever switching control. By abusing the character-switching system, am I subverting authorial intention, missing out on the story they wanted to tell? But then, if they didn’t want me to take advantage of it, they wouldn’t have put it in. I think of the action-figures metaphor again. This game isn’t a story so much as a playhouse to mess around in.