It might be hard to believe at first, but there’s a consistent order to the waves of enemies that appear. Unlike other twitchy, reflex-based games from recent memory, this one doesn’t spawn your opponents randomly. The relentless thrill of blasting baddies and the smooth transition between the game over screen and a fresh start (tapping R instantly resets it at any time) make it easy to get sucked in, losing entire hours to the black hole of “ just one more try.” The Devil Is in the DetailsĪs simple as Devil Daggers’ run-and-gun routine may seem, there’s enough technical detail to make exploring and exploiting its various systems one chaotic hell of a good time. With the amount of intensity packed into a single second of gameplay, even a one-minute run can feel like an eternity. Hordes of floating skulls and disembodied demon heads spew out of tentacled behemoths, mindlessly giving chase while increasingly grotesque beasts spawn from all sides until the mobs become too overwhelming to fend off any longer. Trying, failing, and trying again is a particularly brutal process in that abyss, where there’s always some new monstrosity threatening to cut your latest attempt short. It’s just you, the daggers that inexplicably fire from your outstretched fingers, and an endless legion of hellspawn battling it out in a dark arena for as long as your skill can carry you, which probably won’t be that long. There are no stats to increase and no levels to beat, either. There are no weapons to pick up, no armor, and besides collectible crystals that power up your dagger shots in tiers, there are no items whatsoever. But it’s also exhilarating, a frantic high-score chaser that buries hours of rewarding playtime deep within its punishing core for only the most determined players to claw out.ĭevil Daggers grounds itself in the look and feel of old-school PC shooters of the ‘90s like DOOM and Quake, then strips the experience down into its purest elements and drops you in without explanation. It’s demanding and frightening – an intensely difficult first-person arena shooter set in some forgotten circle of hell, where survival happens only a handful of seconds at a time and death is constantly looming over your shoulder. (To me, Hyper Demon looks more disorienting in videos and gifs than it actually feels when playing, but if I'm wrong, I can't think of a more valid use of the Steam refund system than feeling ill.Devil Daggers is a nightmare that I keep coming back to. I'm Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar, except I have a wizard gun and no patience for five-dimensional aliens. In Hyper Demon, it doesn't feel like I'm navigating a real 3D space so much as gliding through reflections and lenses. It's a lot to take in, although 1994 game Descent would be more likely to make me queasy. "Holographic" red images warn you about enemies approaching from behind, and the wildest feature, a dynamic field of view that can reach up to 180-degrees, can make it look as if the world is being reflected on a silver orb in front of you. Somehow, you have to do all of this with your face pressed against the side of a hyperspace tunnel. Resource management is interesting: Keep shooting and you won't absorb gems, which power up your basic attacks, but that can be helpful, because you can alternatively wait for a good moment to suck them into your gun for a laser attack. Your main weapon only has two basic attacks-dagger machine gun or dagger shotgun, basically-but there are complex ways to manipulate enemies through movement abilities and to turn gems and other powerups into kaleidoscopic laser attacks. Mercifully, there are built-in tutorials, so you don't have to figure out what a "Dagger Jump + Stomp" is on your own.
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