Litil Divil review

This review is for the Microsoft Windows version of Litil Divil.

I don’t know who Litil Divil is for, but even worse I don’t really know what it actually is. I started the game as a red devil with a scrotum for a chin, and I pressed Z repeatedly to hit a big goblin with a stick. I had to press Z at the same time as I pressed the direction I wanted to attack, which I figured out accidentally, as the game doesn’t establish it. After whacking away at this big goblin he eventually died, and I entered a labyrinth. Inside the labyrinth, the camera shifted to be behind me as I walked through its corridors, none of which looked any different from the others. I went through various doors. One door opened up to reveal a giant spider. The game switched to a top-down view and I pressed Z repeatedly to stomp the smaller spiders it launched at me. I did this for several minutes, but stopped once it became clear that nothing was happening.

Another door opened into what I assumed was a shop. There was no shopkeeper to speak of, but some muddy-looking sprites and numbers were on the screen with no explanation as to what they did or even what they were. I hadn’t seen or collected anything resembling money, so I left this room. Yet another door took me to a room full of boiling acid with swollen buboes sinking and rising in time. I pressed Z repeatedly to jump between the buboes in what I would call the closest thing I encountered to what I’d call ‘gameplay’. I became very good at timing these jumps, but every time I reached the opposite end of the room I was incinerated by a seemingly unavoidable blast of fire, so I left the room.

This is just about everything I encountered. The game has no comprehensible voices or text of any kind, so what was actually going on I can’t tell you. I don’t know if I did any of the things that happened to me correctly or how I could go about doing them differently in the future. All I know is that unless you bought a physical copy of this in the ‘90s and also have what I can only imagine to be a massive instruction manual explaining every little detail of what you’re supposed to do in this bizarre nightmare, and are somebody who doesn’t mind shockingly bad controls and visuals to boot, I wouldn’t recommend that you buy Litil Divil.