The first time I opened up to a medical professional about some childhood trauma, it was like surgically excising a living thing from behind my breastbone. That experience — the galloping pulse, the ventricle-deep ache, the sensation that something alive and malicious was digging in its claws to stay rooted — made it easy to see how one might disavow ownership of those emotions and assign them to supernatural entities. Demons rather than one’s own untilled memories.

That, it seems, is the connection being made by Judson Cowan as well. Personal Demons is Cowan’s chaser to the successful Deep Regrets. Where that game used fishing for eldritch horrors as a stand-in for, well, deep regrets, Personal Demons is about calling demons to your own private summoning circle in order to dispel them. Or to confront them? To host a tea party for them? Look, it may be an apt metaphor, but it isn’t always a perfect one.

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