The Devil's Work

You are not the monster. You are the excuse.

Two minor demons are assigned a twelve-flat apartment building and seventeen people who live in it. You have no claws, no spells that kill, no way to force anything. What you have is patience, a key that fits the wrong door, and a very good sense of when someone is about to make a mistake on their own.

Every ending in this building is written by its residents. You only make sure they have the pen.

Two demons, one building, no direct violence

• The Inner Demon works inside. It slips through doors after dark, moves objects, plants forgeries, and cannot survive daylight.
  
• The Outer Demon works the street, the market and the park — the places the Inner one cannot reach by day.

Neither of you can do the job alone, and you cannot simply hand things to each other. Items move through dead drops: one leaves it, the other collects it. Play with a friend online, sit next to them on one screen in split-screen local co-op, or play alone and switch between the two.

Sabotage is small, consequences are not

Forge a doctor's note. Loosen the thing that was already loose. Leave a perfumed love letter where a jealous man will find it. More than sixty ways to interfere, fifty-one of them crafted by hand out of what you steal from people's kitchens and drawers.

Nobody dies because you pushed them. They die because of what they did after you left the room.

Suspicion is a person, not a meter

Every resident tracks you separately, from "something felt off" to calling the superintendent. They talk to each other. A rumour you started in flat 7 turns up in flat 3 two days later, wearing a different face.

And above all of it, an Angel is watching. It does not chase you. It escalates — and by the time you notice it has, you have already lost the room to move in.

Seventeen people who were fine before you arrived

A building superintendent with a fixed patrol and a heavy set of keys. A couple whose marriage is one bad evening from ending. A boy who skips school. A woman who prays every night at the same hour. They wake, work, argue, sleep — with or without you. Corrupt one and the others feel it, because they are neighbours, and neighbours notice.

Five acts, five endings, no clean one

A first run at this building takes about ten to sixteen hours. There is total damnation, there is chaotic failure, there is the Angel winning, there is a victory that costs you more than it pays — and there is the one where somebody's conscience wakes up at the worst possible moment and takes the whole floor with them.

You will not get through this building without deciding what you are willing to do to people who never did anything to you.