Current personal best, 406.897

Masterclass in design. A general & vague term wholly applicable in every aspect from thee leaderboard crawl, heat-sensing enemy proximity radar, blitzed out uptick scoring system; superbly playful despite a rather oppressing & suffocating field. Thee offense to Devil Daggers defense.

Look no further than thee lobby if you want to bear witness to thee harmonious elegance present. A player finds themselves surrounded by birds fluttering about, surrounding your respectively-ranked dagger which, upon touching, commences thee onslaught. Hours of mastering & learning new tricks until you face thee boss, hours more to learn how to defeat an angel, & said angel will explode into a frenzy of docile birds, allowing your dagger to appear once again. Without breaking sequence, simply touch it to begin again.

My two main gripes with this game are minor, in a way. First of which is being at thee mercy of RNG. At times, snakes will spawn underneath spiders, scuttlers will spawn within snakes. Higher level playing depends on a quality route & when that becomes muddled at a dice roll, it can feel as though some runs are simply wasting your time. Secondly, there are a couple little inconsistencies in some mechanics. Scuttlers seem to have priority during a rail ricochet despite your target being dead center on a spawner, etc. Stomping feels like a crapshoot, particularly with snake heads. Seemingly damning strikes, but ultimately these do not ever really become a problem until you're fighting for milliseconds. Thankfully, some of these faults can be easily worked around with some smart improvisation, which this game allows for a plethora of.

A vicious Sisyphean cycle.

unreal horrific imagery, astoundingly ingenious game design, watertight perfectly crafted punishing gunplay, absurdly high skill ceiling, helped with an accessible and inviting tutorial and a fantastic ranking system that makes it instantly addictive to want to grow and get better at the game....

i would go on more about the way this game is designed - from the 4d 360 degree proximity warnings that flash on your screen, to the way enemies move and behave in a way that is contingent with everything else in the game, to sound cues and movement tricks and metas and tricks that can be learned with frequent play - but ill be honest, im not good at talking about that shit. the game design here is too complicatedly crafted for me to explain, but trust me this game is absolutely perfect when it comes to killing you fairly and killing you often.

from just a technical standpoint this is absolutely everything i want in a fps game mechanically speaking. while there's no story or real function of the game beyond "shoot the fuck out of everything as fast as possible", it doesnt need it at all.

and no theres no way in hell im beating this i could not even beat devil daggers these games are way too hard for me.

Fantastic game, fixed every issue I had with Devil Daggers while also being extremely innovative in graphics, audio, and gameplay. Knocking off half a star for the objective flaw that is how inaccurate and obnoxiously precise the laser ricochet is. At higher levels of play you need to spam it constantly and it randomly missing causes so much frustration. (Not a skill issue, my PB is 287) Also the final boss is pretty lame and cheap. Also readability isn't as bad as it looks, but has still gotten me killed a handful of times. Other than that this is peak arcade.

The stagnation brought about by trends is an illness you can only truly see when you manage to get your hands on something unique and fresh, a moment that I gladly experienced when I first played Devil Daggers all the way back in 2016. The simplicity of its unachievable taunting goal and its hellish display of lovecraftian inevitability did more to revitalize a genre in less than 30 seconds than what a decade+ of modern console First Person Shooters failed to do.

Sorath's audacious nonchalant drop of its spiritual sequel Hyper Demon is somehow even better than Devil Daggers. Watching the stroboscopic migraine inducing trailer, it doesn't really manage to convey the sense of presence and awareness Hyper Demon puts you in until you are the one actually holding the mouse and keyboard inside its hellish prism of anxiety.

While at first glance not doing much to differenciate itself from its predecessor, the brilliance of Hyper Demon only reveals itself when you start fighting against the real innovation and evolution of this project: the score. Constantly ticking down beyond the zero digit, the challenge of Hyper Demon revolves around outrunning an indifferent ever reversed clock that assaults you with endless pursuing, screen filling and noise making nightmare projections inside a kaleidoscopic void.

Getting a high score in Devil Daggers was a curse disguised as a blessing that further extended downtime and proportionally decreased your engagement with it, a design flaw that the dev team picked up on and cleverly exploited in Hyper Demon to constantly force you into the frying pan of death, and the added versatility of its new combo stringing mechanics, power ups and enemies instill a level of verticality and speed that far outmatches its now tamer older sibling.

The arcade-y nature of Hyper Demon is a trait that inevitably puts it into a niche that will understandably discourage some players off who require more tangible and extrinsic rewards than a high score like narrative and progression, but you will be hard pressed to find this year another experience that in the span of a couple of seconds consumes your senses with a level of clarity that has you ignoring every survival instinct and throwing yourself into death, grasping at an always escaping victory while skulls from hell spell your misfortune through ghastly red premonitions.

What stays is the terrifying image of me sitting alone in front of a computer screen in the corner of a dark room at 1 am, in a daze of lunacy and caffeine while I witness my name toppling hundreds of poor souls while ascending a ladder that further demands more of my sanity. This is my GOTY, and I don't see it being topped.

Devil Daggers' cooler cousin, but the blistering pace combined with piling on new tech means a lot more salt. The hyper-aggresive scoring essentially repairs the frustrations of DD - Hyper Demon is entirely the climax of a DD run with none of the setup. In exchange, however, it's added a lot of new tricks & tactics to help you keep up with the new paradigm of aggression. This makes the skill ceiling seem higher, but also leads to drastically more frustrating or unreadable deaths. I'll elaborate for a bit:

- The dash / stomp keybinding takes a while to adjust, and you will be constantly misdashing into enemies.
- Scuttlebugs are a source of frustration, eating a lot of damage if you fail to stomp them out or rail laser them (and those misdashes will inevitably cause such an occurrence).
- Snakes are extremely difficult to read and have to be widely avoided when attempting to grab the powerup, which is made difficult by their flailing hitboxes.
- The dodge is interesting, but seems to fuzz up hitboxes or squeeze you out of unlivable situations, which leads to some uncertainty with what is lethal and what isn't.
- The triple-laser auto aim is just fuzzy enough to feel inconsistent, with no clear indication of range beyond a sound that I find occasionally hard to parse (it'll ding '3' times and only target one or two enemies).
- The rail laser itself is extremely precise and requires much harsher aim than anything else in the game.
- The mega-laser you get from holding rclick when you nab the powerup is almost totally useless without a green bomb or a big crystal.
- Spiders are meant to drop and become vulnerable when approached/dashed under, but the trigger / indication for their drop-invulnerable states is mediocre (a sound cue very late into their descent, and not much more than a leg flail when spawning a bomb).
- The arena's dim-lit wobbliness makes it hard to tell where any edge is when shit's gone wrong until you're already walking into it, and enemies completely disappear when outside the border.
- Loads of bullet-time slowmo + crazy ultra-bendy FOV nonsense makes gauging distances hard.

Since a lot of these are less "hardline issues" and more "control scheme and enemy handling fuzziness", I expect to care less about them the more I play. At ~200 seconds, I still find them decently frustrating, but it was distinctly worse as I was initially learning the ropes. That's more likely a consequence of Devil Daggers' extreme simplicity and my own expectations, though. That is to say - if anyone can correct/inform me on why these features act this way, please do. Even with a tutorial mode, this game is fairly obtuse.

The tl;dr here is that HD has managed to squeeze the best-est bits of DD's prime, but has lost a lot of the level-headed consistency and simplicity during the translation. I wouldn't disagree with anyone who thinks that's a good thing, but I think it means HD is less of a Devil Daggers replacement, and more of a fantastic accompaniment when DD's frustrations boil over (and vice-versa!)

I've not spoken much on the visuals because they can't really be conveyed thru anything other than gameplay. This game opens your third eye or some shit. It's pure magic. Play at 180 FOV and develop perfect vision.

Should HYPER DEMON receive a patch which fixes the currently-present plethora of issues the mid-to-late-game (in the scope of one's score, not individual run duration), it would become a perfect video game. The grind to 350 is very good, and though I haven't attained the maximum acknowledgement milestone the game offers -- that being a dagger reward at a score of 400 -- I do not see me pushing myself that far. In spite of its often frustrating flaws, I would recommend any FPS-liker -- sort of or not -- to participate in HYPER DEMON and experience Sorath dominating the genre and once again proving they know how to design a perfect video game.

This game kicks all kinds of ass but it reminds me of that episode of Adventure Time where Finn and Jake encounter a ghost that challenges them to a game of "drop ball."

MY high score...

...is 10. :)

The Devil Daggers developer returns from the void with another arcade shooter that functions more like an inversion than a sequel.

It retains the same shart-or-spray primary weapon, and the enemy archetypes (skulls) are functionally identical, but the change to the scoring system is a brilliant slight of hand.

Instead of being an endless arcade shooter where your score is determined by how long your session time was, Hyper Demon counts DOWN and forces you to raise the time/score by killing enemies in rapid succession.

Aside from some cute philosophical implications (Devil Daggers is a theoretically perfect game, and Hyper Demon can be theoretically perfected), the immediate change is that beating your high score and improving your performance no longer incurs diminishing returns from the player.

Hyper Demon is an overall improvement over Devil Daggers, and a fascinating case study in game design, and how radically an experience can change with the slightest tweak.

Simultaneously easier than DD, but also more insane and significantly more illegible. I kind of hate it much much more, and also can't help but respect it more. The biggest issue is that I am personally tired of treating the game as half a manual, things especially here are so counter-intuitive that even the training mode is simply teaching you how you're 'kind of' supposed to be playing at the very minimum. This sort of compounds into a glorious but sort of fucked combo shooter that desires to be as ultimately incomprehensible as possible for you to pass over.

That's kind of sick, but it leaves me rather in the dust. It doesn't induce the panic that Devil Daggers does to me and instead feels like a sense stress test. For its modus operandi of some utter hellish ultraplanar fight against some undefinable deity I can't think of many things in general that's such a perfect match. It absolutely continues on its predecessor of being a congruous entity that you have to fully understand in order to survive and even progress. Its arcadey nature asks for creating clarity out of unwatchable madness.

So as a realized vision I have to like, sort of stan it! But I also feel an utter bone to pick, a sledgehammer I want to take to this sort of approach. From a personal note, for one, this game is absolutely irresponsible. The steam page fine print has an epilepsy warning but the game should fucking start with one, if not more, as should its creator be saying such shilling this game past twitter and youtube. When I first streamed it in front of a friend they felt so unwell they had to tune out for a solid 15 or so minutes because they felt like they were going to have a seizure and they're not epileptic. It's rudimentarily so overzealous in its mission that it genuinely hurts my eyes after a little bit of time to play, and its mixing and sound design just hurts and nails on chalkboards but all of those are Intensely Important Indicators to play. To be blunt I almost feel a sort of noxious "loves its ingroup and hates everyone else" vibe from all that.

But idk, it's like mostly fun past all that. Things connect pretty smartly and it can lead to some intense fun, and it'll certainly satisfy those who REALLY REALLY like Devil Daggers and this uncompromising way of creation. Which is totally valid. It has got crazy good game design top to bottom.

My best score is 146.441 as of writing, run here. Another short review, wrote this one pretty quickly.

Ninja Gaiden essence: the game. If you've played NG that should immediately give you an idea of the type of interactions at play here, but if you haven't Yeahlookiehere has a good review, I won't bother repeating it all. I would just add that the official replay website is simple to use, and the spider and fish enemies are very well-designed. The core design is pretty damn solid, the devs are clearly on the right track and know what to go for.

However, there are some notable issues that started getting under my skin after a bunch of runs. It's clear that the devs have made giving the player lots of information a priority, but nonetheless readability can be an issue. Certainly the aesthetic is unique and striking, but the spherical projection combined with only having one main color for enemies makes things blend into a black-and-gold soup at times. The spider re-emerging is especially prone to get lost in this, which can be quite deadly. For some reason enemies will disappear from view if they go into the darkness, a very odd decision. Usually this isn't too bad, but for the skulls and especially the centipede it gets very obnoxious.

The centipede in general doesn't fit this game well IMO, apparently it's a carryover from Devil Daggers. It doesn't really interact with the essence system at all, and the only reliable way to deal with it seems to be to stand under it and shoot, but then it becomes difficult to see because it's so large and can curl in on itself. Laser ricochet feels a bit awkward to use, it's difficult to tell what (if anything) it will go for in many situations and big shots have a tendency to wet-noodle and not do much. Grab and laser being bound to the same key is a major design flaw, you will naturally be wanting to aim your laser at the big gems so it's very easy to accidentally mouse over and grab them instead. Stomp has a similar issue, and not having access to it out of normal jumps feels counterintuitive, especially in the heat of the moment.

Despite my issues, the game is lots of fun overall. Any fan of fast-paced arcadey action or Ultrakill's Cyber Grind should add it to their list, it's well worth a spin.

Edit: The final boss sucks ass