This is RE/PLAY, where all that stands between us and eternal darkness is our right hand.When it comes to constant excitement and engrossing mystery in games, there's nothing better than horror. This week, Tommy revisits ‘Devil Daggers’, developed and published by Sorath and available on Steam. SO… THIS AGAIN? Devil Daggers holds an appeal unlike many games. It’s mechanically simplistic but designed to be maddeningly precise, holding with it the potential to defeat even the most skilled of gamers, try after try, again and again, forever. Accepting defeat is an option, of course. Tracking score like old arcade cabinets, Devil Daggers also sports a system that allows you to view any playthrough you desire, found with all its charted scores. Viewing somebody else’s run is but one click away, allowing an attractive ability to spy on other players’ techniques so that you may suss out how, exactly, these people got such high scores. The tension of slowly improving your scores and your technique is reminiscent of days spent in an arcade being utterly defeated by games that were made to do just that. With Devil Daggers, you get the same thrill but you can keep your quarters. You’re surrounded by nothing but the dimly lit platform on which you stand. So minimal it skews on the arcane, Devil Daggers’ tone and all-but-absent setup inspires in you a morbid curiosity, like a child peering into a dark basement. Your parents told you never to go down there, but there you are, placing one foot in front of the other in the first defiant steps towards blackness. Seize the dagger and find yourself in its place. Standing in the same position in which the dagger previously hung, the world around you suddenly feels alive. Stand still long enough and find yourself in a sea of demons in flight. THE MECHANICS: Devil Daggers thrives in its mechanical fortitude and its strict one touch, one kill nature. All presented on a hovering platform about the size of an average home in the suburbs (though far less comforting), a sense of claustrophobia is sure to set in as more enemies begin to fill the arena. Falling from the stage proves just as lethal as any encounter with your foes and pyres appear from the blackness to spill ethereal skulls who quickly lock on and close in around you. Soon, enormous arachnidan hellions loom over the edge of the void looking to steal what little you have in the realm of aid. The visuals, sound, feel of the gameplay can only be described as a masterpiece, but I'm not in love with the high level gameplay the same way I was with Devil Daggers. The game is still very fun for me in short bursts as a quick fix of action. There's little things I get better at, and it's fun experimenting with new strategies, but generally it feels like I'm playing a slots machine. The point I'm at right now in Hyper Demon makes it feel like nothing I do matters. Maybe this is surprising, but even 7 years into the optimization of the game, the RNG in Devil Daggers makes very little impact on your run. I've been playing Devil Daggers for 4 years now, and I still see obvious improvement that directly impacts my score as I continue to play. I like doing something that felt impossible not so long ago. Some people don't mind it, and it's a very low time commitment, but it puts a cap on something that attracted me about Devil Daggers. There's nothing wrong with that objectively. There's also a good amount of RNG that will constantly kill your run at my current skill level. It has nuance, but it doesn't feel deep or interesting enough for me to be obsessed. The 1% I will critique on is the highest level of play. I think 99% of the game is perfect and blows every single AAA game out of the water into space. I play it regularly, but I personally don't feel the drive to make a serious attempt at pushing my score past 400. I am so grateful that they let me playtest Hyper Demon, and I deeply appreciate all the love and care they put into their creations.
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