This stylish, text adventure heist game has big Device 6 vibes

Delete After Reading is a delightful looking text-based puzzler that will be familiar to anyone who’s played Simogo’s excellent (albeit sadly iOS-only game) Device 6, only with fewer spooks this time. Like Simogo's surreal thriller, most of Delete After Reading plays out like you're reading a novel, where scrolling through paragraphs of text will reveal images, clues and puzzles you can interact with. As the devs put it, Delete After Reading is a “game you can read, and a book you can play,” and looks and sounds really quite rad. Even better, it’s releasing on March 14th.

Device 6 is a good analogy for how this game might play (or read?) but the pitch for Delete After Reading sounds infinitely kookier. A despised billionaire steals the best game of all time, The Curse Of Penguin Island. That’s when a file named “DELETE AFTER READING” appears on your character's phone, inviting you to join a heist and steal Penguin Island back. The rest of your squad includes Nina, a century-old ghost (103 years to be exact), Cinco the goblin rapper, and Tomate, a rabbit who claims to be the reincarnation of John Belushi, the late Blues Brother. Belushi’s motivation to join the heist is unclear, at the time of writing, but by gum it sure sounds like an enticing setup.

So, Delete After Reading is decidedly less spooky than Device 6, but I’m still into how whacky everything sounds. I watched a hefty number of films last year that centred on taking down billionaires, and I’m excited to see more and more games tackle that too. Hi-Fi Rush already has the ball rolling and we won’t need to wait much longer to see Delete After Reading pass it on. Saving a game from the clutches of an evil billionaire seems very hyper aware, but I'm here for it.

Delete After Reading is launching on PC via Steam on March 14th. If you really can’t wait that long, there’s also a demo available right now.