Demon Throttle

released on Sep 30, 2022

Demon Throttle tells the story of a beautiful vampiress and dusty gunslinger on a quest for vengeance against a demon that stole her mystical chalices and slept with his estranged wife. Now the two unlikely companions must blast their way through four monstrous generals and their wicked domains to lift the demon's curse and exact their revenge.


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A game that mainly caught my eye for being a schmup which is one of my favorite genres alongside it being a physical only switch exclusive release.

The game itself wears its retro influence like a badge, only 4 levels, 4 secret macguffins to collect to get the true ending with the caveat being its difficulty much like games that inspired it. You'll get your ass kicked a few times but after a few goes you master it.

While I do enjoy games like that, for Demon Throttle in specific its a double edged sword. While it rewards your mastery of its mechanics, its also pretty damn mean throwing curveballs at you with random events that can happen in any of the stages. While it does spice the game up, I also feel like it makes the game unfairly difficult at times. I played on Normal and my main game overs were from the "Speed Demon" event that can inflict a stage. Stuff like that just throws off your groove even after mastery.

As for the game being physical only, I give Doinksoft some props to sticking to their guns on pulling something like this in this day and age. It definitely worked out for them as an indie studio. I have no opinion on the handling of it all though. But it was nice to play game that made me feel like a kid again in the sense where I didn't have much to look at for guidance on what to do and where to find secrets and stuff.

That said I don't know if I'd completely recommend this game? If you like replaying hard games until you master it then I'd say go for it (its $20 USD). If you're the type to be one and done with games and don't mess with extra content though then there's not much here for you. If you're good at games like this then you can beat it in under an hour, if you're not so good then you'll defs stretch that playtime for a while with numerous runs.

Well-crafted shmup-action-RPG hybrid which gets out of its own way, but refuses to compromise on things such as "save points" or "continues".

Guess that makes sense, since the game's physical-only release shows a similar ideological commitment to the bit.

Pretty fun for what it is but a pretty shameful concept in terms of marketing and publishing. Definitely well-tempered in terms of difficulty on Normal for the most part, though I'm not a fan of how slowly the characters move by default as well as how spongy the weak enemies tend to be for a shoot-em-up. The bosses are varied enough but the game's short with only a few stages, though I didn't get the secret ending (yet?) so there might be a huge load of extra content I missed by just getting the regular ending and playing a bit more after that. Not like anyone would know, right? The game's only got a small amount of people able to play it in the first place...

I'm quite a fan of the music I heard and the voices are fun in terms of both acting and sound quality. It's pretty nice sound design, nothing super out-there for the current age but clearly done with passion. The look of the graphics and the feel of the controls are both solid; in general I do enjoy the game's presentation and style even if retraux is a bit less loved by most nowadays. It gets the quarter-munching nature of old games down well enough, though I question why the devs missed any opportunities to bring a dead player back unless you beat a level by not giving the game some kind of credit system. It's also pretty annoying that neither character has EXP information unless you pause the game so you generally don't know how many enemies to kill to get to your next level before a boss, which can limit the amount of strategy to put in for the game's light RPG mechanics unless you're a big fan of the + button. Still, finding the secret areas and mowing down every block you see is nice as you can often get plenty of bonus EXP and power-ups to make your trips to the pause menu less necessary.

Getting away from the game itself for a minute though, the fact that the game is physical only feels like a detriment to it, especially since its limited nature could never have been lived up to by the game for how short and content-light it is. Furthermore, the game having old-style secrets and codes to put in is cool but hampered by the fact that only a maximum of approximately 9000 people are ever going to play it at all, meaning any shared information will be scarce at best unless the game eventually gets a wider release. This was incredibly lame of a decision and while I don't regret playing the game, I can't possibly support developers going this route in the future if they can help it. The game's fun as I've described and can make for a sweet afternoon with a buddy in co-op, but it has enough issues and a lack of longevity that I can't help but feel burned. If it had been released more cheaply and made more widely available I'm sure I would have felt much less lukewarm on it, but as it is I just don't think it was worth it.

Never played this but it's cool to see Guillaume Singelin's artworks

why you gotta make it a physical-only release, SRG litteraly doesn't ship to my country