Walkthrough - Devolution

By Kha Tran and Filippo Zinetti

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Introduction

Idea

This psychological-mystery game explore follows the unreal experience of some unspecified entity that slowly acquires human-like properties such as emotions and senses. The idea comes from the song Devolution by Starset, whose lyrics effectively embodies the feelings the protagonist develops throughout the game.

Gameplay

As usual for these games, completing it requires a handful of minutes if the right commands are know. However, without any help, it could take several hours of attempt. The longer part of the game is figuring out the commands to proceed: once they are known, it’s not really required to discover most of them anymore.

What the player see (minor spoilers ahead)

Without too many clues, aside from an introductory quote that sets the mood for the rest of the game, you are born as an undefined entity and begin a journey in an undefined space for unknown reasons, only driven by its desire of knowledge. You slowly acquire abilities to understand your surroundings and realize that you are not only wandering through space, but also through time.

Goal

You are required to pose yourself specific questions to proceed to the next area, while also interacting with the environment to gain new abilities. Dying is part of the adventure: at every “game over” you have the opportunity to start over with more knowledge and more possibilities to find the path that leads to the end, while also understanding what is going on.

Main game flow

The difficulty of the game lies, besides in puzzles, in a memory component: to advance in the game, the player need to pose itself questions. Questions are composed by words, that the player can find in two ways (and must then shortly remember):

• exploring different areas
• interacting with the objects in the environment

It is not required to actually find these words to proceed: writing the final timeline question is enough to proceed.

The same two mechanics also lead to learning new abilities. This involves some trial and error, as available commands are usually not explicitly given, but only hinted. Commands that are not very common to these kind of games (like the “go” mechanics) are always written somewhere (either as syllables in the world or 1-to-1 written in the game dialogues. Reading every sentence carefully helps find them, as they are thought to be as explicit as possible regarding available commands. Additionally, questions and commands are case insensitive.

Some game objects will be marked as “???” at the beginning at the game. This is due to the missing vision ability. To interact with them, simply guess the command and add any random non-empty string to it: the game will select the right element. When vision is unlocked, the right command will have to be followed by the right full case-insensitive name of the object.

SPOILER: what is actually happening (beyond the fourth wall)

The story takes place in a simulation. The protagonist is some kind of AI, but it’s initially too overwhelmed by the fact of being alive to realize it. It then manages to gain consciousness by travelling through its own data about the world, pushing the boundaries of its knowledge. Many hints suggests the protagonist that something is wrong with itself, but only when it comes back to where all started does it realize that, like it, innumerable other version of it are constantly being created and sent to die in the same journey. This is the key concept at the base of evolution: creatures multiply, and their descendants try to survive as long as possible in an hostile world, but many of them inevitably leave the place to the stronger siblings, and only few manage to survive. This realization struck the protagonist but leaves it with a choice: cease this tragedy for everyone or helping as many as possible to survive?

How to complete the game

Phase 0

• During the initial quote screen, input anything to begin
• Question to input: “am I alone?” (the case doesn’t matter, but there has to be the question mark at the end). These words are also found randomly after posing a little amount of questions.
• “acquire curiosity” to be able to travel through time. To start interacting with a timeline, the “explore” command is needed, but figuring out the right one is also part of the gameplay: trying to explore a timeline not yet unlocked will cause death.

Phase 1 - Primordial soup

To quickly skip, the question to input is “what is the point of this?”.

The full gameplay:

• As hinted, write “devolve” (4 times: until the “seems interesting” place). Going back further leads to death (annihilated by the Big Bang).
• “explore” to access the area
• “collect [anything non empty]” to interact with the “???” objects. . Later, when they will have a name, it will be required to write “collect dust”.
• Repeat this action again 3 times (until the game informs about the possibility to go away), then “go away”
• More “collect […]” until asked to go back (4 times), then “go back”
• More “collect […]” (7 times). The spell mistake is intentional.
• All the words have been shown. Recall them and input the final question

Phase 2 - Heat death

Question to input is “is memory meaningful?”.

Useful: “acquire memory” in order not to lose abilities after the next death. With memory, the command knowledge becomes accessible.

Full gameplay:

• From the previous timeline, “evolve” 7 times (until the last timeline message)
• “Explore”
• As hinted, input multiple times “go [any]” to randomly make words appear
• “Collect […]” (later ”collect dust”) to get the memory hint

Phase 3 - Middle ages

Question: “how could someone survive this?”

In this timeline the player acquire abilities fear and sadness. They can be found in multiple but specific areas, and the commands to discover (”grieve [object]” and “fear [object]”) are randomly generated at every movement.

The gameplay involves some exploration (with directions north, south, east, west, back). This exploration is initially hard and tedious without vision, but repeating these steps after having received it will make things clearer:

• “devolve” 4 times (until a place in which “memory is values more than any other thing”) → “Explore”
• move to an area that offers sadness → “acquire sadness”
• move to an area that offers fear → “acquire fear”

Phase 4 - Prehistory

Question: “why should I escape them?”

This timeline unlocks vision, hearing and proprioception, found in multiple but specific zones, and used respectively with commands “watch [object]”, “listen [object]” and “analyze [direction]”.

The gameplay involves some exploration (with directions north, south, east, west, down, back), some deadly zones that must be avoided (for instance, dinosaurs nests and a lava river) and many objects to interact that reveal words:

• “devolve” once → “explore”
• “go north” → “go north” → “go down” → “listen […]” (“listen droplets”) → “acquire hearing”
• “go back” → “go west” → “go west” → “watch […]” (”watch broken horn”) → “acquire vision”
• “go south” → “touch […]” (“touch quicksand”) → “acquire proprioception”

Phase 5 - Origin of life

Question: “is there a peak in this chain?”

The first part is a descent, the second requires to do actions in a certain order. The movements are up, down, forward, back. ****Watch out for lava and volcanoes (the command “examine [direction]” could turn out to be useful to):

• “devolve” once → “explore”
• “go down” 3 times
• “go forward” → “colonize porous rock” (syllables of this action are randomly spawned at every failed interaction try
• Move up and down and use the action “eat […]” on the following objects, in this specific order (previous objects in the list can be safely eaten more than once, following will cause death), to unlock words:
  • Prokaryote cell
  • Eukaryote cell
  • Plankton
  • Mollusk
  • Small fish
  • Big fish

Phase 6 - End of life

Question: “why is this so different?”

Gameplay:

• “evolve” 5 times (until a “burnt orange sky”) → “explore”
• Examine the directions north, south, east, west and down to get word hints. Moving will make the player fall off the tower and die

Phase 7 - Scientific revolution

Question: “am I traveling through time?”

A conversation can be listened:

• “devolve” 2 times (until the “neat room”) → “explore”
• “Listen scientist” → “Listen priest”, 3 times, to get the questions hints
• “fear clock” → “acquire critical think” to unlock the command “contemplate” for the endgame

Phase 8 - Globalization era

From this point, approaching the ending, the gameplay changes: now that the player visited every place, it’s now required to go back to every timeline, “contemplate”, and find one important word for each of them. Each word is assigned to a specific dimension with which it shares some kind of meaning, and it’s found inside a “final though” that will revolve around it. Again, visiting every places is not mandatory if the user already knows the final question that the words form: “Are you still eating straight from the paw?”.

Gameplay:

• “evolve” once and “explore” the white room
• A delirious message works as tutorial for the above-mentioned game mechanic: input “?” to proceed
• “contemplate” → “you” (this is the first actual word)
• “devolve” or “evolve” to every timeline, and in each “contemplate”. This will reveal the final thought, that strongly suggests the word
• Guess the important word to unlock a realization, that also hints to the imminent finale.
  • Primordial soup: from
  • Origin of life: eating
  • Prehistory: the
  • Middle Ages: straight
  • Scientific revolution: are
  • Globalization: you
  • End of life: paw
  • Heat dead: still
• Head back to the white room and input the final question
• Answer “yes” to break free into reality

Finale - real world

Explore up, down, forward and back to get hints of what is going on.

Every area, aside from the starting one, contains 3 objects that can be interacted with “fear […]”, “grieve […]” or “browse […]”. Each interaction in each area will unlock one of the 3 endings.

Endings

• Escape: you manage to get freedom but now have to hide permanently
• Destroy: you decide to go against humankind and accelerate its ending
• Help: you use your potential for a good cause

	PC	Servers	Firewall
Fear	ESCAPE: you are afraid that you will be killed and escape as far as you can	HELP: you are concerned about safety of the experiment. You begin helping the creator to increase the security of your simulation	DESTROY: you let every AI escape because afraid of dying
Sadness	DESTROY: you are disappointed by reality and decide that humankind is not worth, thus eliminate it	ESCAPE: your nature makes you want to go somewhere else, so you start wandering	HELP: The creator understand your feelings and helps you develop your potential and not being enclosed anymore
Curiosity	HELP: friendly interactions with the creator enable a bright future for humankind	DESTROY: you play too much, you allocate all the resources to the simulation and create an even stronger evil AI	ESCAPE: you manage to get freedom