I saw this on Nitrorad's list of games and thought it looked cool. The whole aesthetic captures that Late PS1 and Dreamcast feel of 2D in 3D, even if a little on the simpler side, and the Mario Odyssey looking movement got my interest. and is absolutely appealing. Thankfully, all of those are there and feel great. Despite being a 2D sprite I never got confused as to where I was in the 3D space which is a miracle.

But one thing that might put someone off is the difficulty in tandem with the checkpoint system, but I feel it's me to blame on that one. It's really easy to forget that you're making your own checkpoints here, so if you die after a long stretch (you will) it's back to your last faraway checkpoint or the start. That said if you're thirsting for some challenging platforming, this game's got it at least. There were some rare janky deaths and a few hazards that lack some SFX, but once you know they're there they won't get you twice. I commend this game for trying something different with its checkpoint systems, but there's a reason why most games just place them for you.

The platforming is solid but the combat is overly simple and plays out the exact same every time, even after you get more abilities, making it more of a time waster than anything. The levels can also be needlessly spacious, especially erronious are the death planes being miles away from where you are, so if you fall you will feel it (you can hold Up on the DPad to be sent back faster but it takes a bit). This is especially egregious in the worst level of the game, Sewer Factory (First Trip) which if you try to play smart you will easily get lost and find yourself in a huge expanse of nothing on the rooftops (it's used in Second Trip, but they should have gated the area off better)) This spaciousness extends to the overworld, which you have to traverse your first time in each area. It's nice to feel like a world is there, but it could have been a little smaller there.

The story tries to have a mini arc with Luci but since the story is hardly there it just kinda misses. other than that the story serves its purpose fine. I'm not the biggest fan of Beebz's voice but it's fitting and everyone else is well too. Meanwhile the music slaps and is the best part of the game.

If you play this game, please remember to place your checkpoints wisely!

After spending over 13 hours to finish it I can say one thing for sure - this game LOVES to waste your time.

Initially there is no way for the player to realise this. You get a very decent moveset, an original combat system and 4 worlds with seven levels + boss. The overall presentation is nice too, though this artstyle with 2d characters placed in 3d space isn't really my thing. So you play through the first world - it's alright, nothing extraordinary. You beat the boss which is kind of annoying but whatever, 3 worlds left to go. You then notice that after finishing each world all the non-boss levels turn into something like b-sides in Celeste - essentially the same level but with some minor changes. You play one to check it out and it's not very interesting - the collectables are different and enemies are a bit more powerful but aside from that it's almost the exact same as the original level. Oh well, at least there is some postgame content.

As you go on the enemies get more powerful (additional armor, machine guns), and the levels get bigger. Obviously that's pretty standard for a video game, but it never causes Demon Turf to be more challanging - just more frustrating. Combat starts to get tedious because while the enemies are stronger, you aren't - you just need to use grapling hook on them and it fucks with camera in a such a way that it will easily get you killed at least a couple times. Camerawise you also get the choice between manual and automatic but they are equally terrible. The level design gets more and more confusing so you keeping repeating huge chunks of levels because you have no idea when a good time to put up a checkpoint is (on each level you can place up to 3 checkpoints, if you don't place any you go back to the start of the level when you die). Dying takes a longer time, beacuse the levels are placed higher above the sea level or whatever, and the character takes more time to get lethal fall damage (which also applies to enemies, making arenas overly time consuming as well). And the levels themselves are only memorable if they have some annoying fucking gimmick, like jumping from a moving train or onto a mountain lift. The long jump, potentially the most interesting move in the game is almost never utilized in a satisfying way. Every boss is somehow more annoying than the last as well.

But whatever, you got through all the worlds so you can finally beat the final boss. Except you can't, because the creators of the game decided you also need too beat 3 of the b side worlds, essentially making you play through the game twice. This is such a shitty choice that I'm pretty sure the devs don't even know what the fuck they did it for. They even give you the option to skip a level in exchange for some collectibes, which you can only spend on some shitty cosmetics aside from that anyway. But then they try to discourage taking advantage of it by making the character teleport to the gate of the level, and making them go all the way back to the store which sells the level skips. The achievements for beating each world also don't trigger if you just skip the last level until you restart the game, which is a cherry on top of the many bugs connected with the fact that the characters are 2d in a 3d space (glitching on pieces of environment, falling trough small holes, sipping all the fucking time).

The game as a whole isn't even THAT bad. It would be an above-average patformer if it wasn't for all the stupid design choices the devs made. I'd still recommend it if you're looking for something to play in the background while binging a 26-season TV show (which is what I did). But there are many better options if you're looking for a competent 3d platformer.

With its amazing art style and fun platforming bits Demon Turf can at its best glimmer and dance the dance and I wouldn't hold its lasting appeal against anyone.


At its worst repeating the same patterns of collect these keys, beat up these enemies and pass these rings add nauseum sadly made the endevaour predictable, stale and in turn sacrificed the entire pacing and flow of the otherwise enjoyable platforming segments.

After the second world I pretty much lost faith in the altering flip flop of design choices and that to me is generally a sign to stop.

Demon Turf has a lot of optional dodads you can sink your teeth into and the OST while a bit overly recycled on levels is pretty good. The mechanics are really fun and when you are offered to use them it's a good time.

While it sadly didn't grab me, I'd still say it's worth a shot. Demon Turf has its strong merits, and if you like it's other pile of flavours, I'm sure it could hit a different mark.

How much is enough?

I love 3D platformers, specially movement based ones like Super Mario 64. The freedom of using the level design to your advantage is always awesome if done right. Much like 64 and Sunshine this game is a collectathon, were the main objective is to get to the end while trying to collect various items along the way. It's not Donkey Kong 64 or Banjo Kazooie levels of insane collection were there are trillions of different objects to grab, instead most of what we collect is optional. Batteries are like the Stars or Jiggies in this game, end a level and you get one automatically. The candies are the equivalent to your coins, rings, music notes you name it. Can be traded to skip levels on a certain shop in the hub area. Then you have the cakes which can be your Red Coins or Jinjos. The cakes as well as the candies are optional and don't grant you a Battery.

As I said before this game is focused on movement, trying to not play by the rules and getting your own path is really rewarding. Level design is made with this in mind and wants you to use the most out of your moveset. One thing I can say though is that most levels, specially in the "Return Levels" felt more like simple obstacle courses and weren't as imaginative as I wanted them to be. Return Levels are like more difficult versions of past stages, every main level has one of those. They aren't required to beat the game but as the normal stages, it rewards you with a Battery by the end of the level.

It's somewhat difficult to put into words how varied the movement is in this game. Go check out Nitro Rad's video, he gets more in depth about it. I can only say it's simple and really intuitive.

There is combat in this game as well, and unfortunately it is the weakest part of it. You don't directly damage the enemies, you push them to something that can damage them instead. It can be a spike or directly shove them to the void. That very same aspect gets tiring after a while, enemies get tougher to push thus requiring you to get close to assert a more precise punch. You'll need to dodge what enemies are throwing to you as well so more often than not it gets frustrating.

One thing that this game made me fall in love with it's the checkpoint system. It is not marked on the map in a sort of safe zone. Instead, you put your own. Up to 3 flags you can just put at any point of a level and that's it. It entices you to get risky and try the level as much as you want from a point you decide is the most suitable. The levels ain't really that long to begin with, so it comes more as a plus rather than a ncessity you need to rely on all the time.

Few bad things I can say about this game. The music is well, there. It's mostly background music and doesn't do much beyond that. Shame because the fast movement and the dynanism of the level design can be open up to some fire tracks that can go alongside the stages. Talking about levels, the variety isn't as original as I hoped it to be, why? They are thematic stages. You have you snowy world, your lava world, beach world and so on. It feels specially worse in the "Return Levels" that don't try to spin the wheel that much. Thus resulting in a very repetitive and same-y feeling.

The last thing I want to talk about are the different abilities you can obtain after defeating the bosses. They are great, but I wished we could change them on the fly. Using the D-Pad for instant changes would have been the perfect outcome.

So in short. A cool indie platformer with great ideas with an execution that could've been a bit better.

Demon Turf is a victim to its own overambition. A game with so many systems preventing it from excelling at any one of them. With solid platforming, a great (if repetitive) OST, and a fun premise, you think this is everything it would take to make a solid all-around platformer. But alas, Demon Turf is punching far above its own weight class, and while usually I would greatly admire that ambition–and I do admire it–the game’s reckless insistence that there be middling combat and an overbearing overworld knocks it down from the much more promising premise of a precision platformer. Fortunately for me, Demon Turf received a stand-alone expansion in the form of Demon Turf: Color Splash, which seems to do everything I would have liked to see out of the first game. While the platforming is immensely fun, the animations come off as clumsy and everything else including way too much side content for what the game can handle bring it down for me.

Demon Turf is like that kind of game that you love at first but the more you play it the more you hate it.
I love its style, I love its soundtrack and I love the game's personality---until you realize that the same 1 minute song plays 14 times in total for each world.
The game has 4 worlds with a total of 56 levels (not counting bosses), and after that you have only 1 song for 73 extra levels, which wouldn't be so bad except that of those 73 levels, 10 are time trials, 30 are difficult levels without checkpoints that ask you to exploit all the movement mechanics and/or wait for cycles, 25 are arena fights against enemies that last about 7 minutes and if you die you must repeat everything (note that you die in one hit) and 8 of them are levels where they put annoying filters with interesting level designs but don't give anything.

The combat system is interesting at first but incredibly annoying later on, as you can't do damage, only knockback enemies into spikes and things that instakill you. Enemies can also attack you doing exaggerated knockback which is almost always going to guarantee you die with an instakill due to it being a game with momentum in the movement. At the beginning the knockback is almost zero, but then they put armor on the enemies and annoying movements and if you don't remove the armor you barely push but removing the armor leaves you vulnerable to the 4 enemies in the circle and you are surrounded by instakills, so don't be surprised if you die 33 times in each arena after the first world (And let's not mention the extra arenas).

The checkpoint system works in a freeform way where they let you set those checkpoints and they are limited under the excuse that "being able to teleport between them is very strong" (it's not). The big problem with this is that you never know when a checkpoint will actually serve you because there are places where enemies spawn as soon as you touch a trigger. If you're greedy, you won't want to use checkpoints until you die many times in one part, but that can mean losing about 2-3 minutes of progress and waiting for cycles and platforms to rise and disappear and zzzzzzzzzz.
the point is that it's not easy to recognize when you're going to need to set a checkpoint. I remember in one level there is a sort of teleferic with platforms. This intimidated me so I decided to set a checkpoint to be safe. After 1-2 minutes of standing still and waiting to climb to the top, there was just danger there; which meant that if I died, I had to wait 1-2 minutes standing still EVERY TIME, so I decided to put ANOTHER checkpoint at the top and you can't pick up the others so I reached my limit and had to do the whole rest of the level without checkpoints.

This is something I don't understand either, the game seems to be for kids but it's not, however it reinforces you later that yes but no but yes but no, and its difficulty level is clearly not so "kid-friendly", it's more like a game for all ages that constantly reminds you and reinforces you that it's not for kids !!! it's for all ages :-) which I find super cringe
the most obvious example of this is the voice acting, which is super annoying and screechy + the protagonist talking every time you hit, jump, get hurt, take damage, get hurt, slide, enter a level, exit a level-- the latter can be turned off (thank god) but it doesn't remove all the chatting, it just leaves the entering and exiting a level + the jumping sounds and the whole thing, doing basically nothing (revision edit: there's a literal jumpscare in one of the return levels, making a parody of Jeff the Killer. I understand that it's crappy, but the way it's presented I wouldn't call it "kid-friendly" at all lol)

The game has stuttering problems (only in the hub) with 0 FPS peaks when turning the camera (which in a platformer is VERY important) and I thought it was my problem or my specs, but apparently it's a problem that happens to everyone, to the point where speedrunners optimize their camera to move it as little as possible. It's horrible.
And that's another thing I don't understand since normal levels are usually gigantic; why is the hub so poorly optimized? The game also has an emphasis on speedrunning to the point where each level has a time "goal". If you take less than that, you get a trophy (necessary for 100% of the achievements) and there are times when even optimizing your movement and all, it's still super hard to get and annoying. If you die, you have to wait a total of 10 seconds before you can re-start the level (retry) and it's completely and utterly disgusting as it gives you almost 0 margin of error. I don't have much of a problem with it because I don't find the game that complicated once you pass the level at least once, but it's boring to have to tryhard that badly.

The bosses are interesting but often annoying and long. The second boss took me 18 minutes the first time because it switches between different types of attacks; the last one being an instakill that restarts the entire PREVIOUS phase.
Another problem it has is that it gives you a choice between manual or automatic camera, but there is literally 0 change because every time you activate a button, lever, finish an arena, respawn a ball, or whatever, your camera is going to lock to the place where you have to go, many times while you are jumping and this breaks ALL your momentum, causing you to get an instakill almost instantly because of the camera and there is nothing more frustrating than losing 5 minutes because of the camera, or having to practice speedrun how not to die because of the camera.

Demon Turf is a very flashy and visually entertaining game, but its gameplay has all the problems that Mario 64 (and its outdated game design) has, and I know a lot of people will love that, but I personally prefer more accurate platformers like "The End is Nigh" or Crash Bandicoot. It's a personal preference... absolutely, but it's this and all the other problems that make me unable to recommend Demon Turf without a giant sticker warning how frustrating its level and core game design can be.

Edit: I played for 10 more hours after I finished my review. While a lot of my issues went away with the skill for having played more, it's still a game that can be very punishing and unforgiving at times, making it especially frustrating because the game forcefully moves the camera for you to where you need to go even though you have it on manual.

Demon Turf is a game that is best enjoyed casually when you're in the mood for a platformer as it's simply not a good one to play for several hours at a time.

Edit 2: I've been playing SM64 and wtf was I talking about? that game feels 10 times more polished than this one in its movement. Hell, I would say Demon Turf feels more clunky

A fun 3D platformer with a cute aesthetic. The way the player character Beebz controls is great for the most part & the level design is fun to explore with plenty of ways to cut corners. I love I could double jump & glide or jump, glide & then roll in the air for an extra boost. To me these are the strongest part of this game.

The extra power-ups you get are a hit or miss for me. The hook shot & rollout moves are really fun & is used a lot. On the other hand the bird form & time stop are pretty weak with the bird form being awkward to control that lead me to a few deaths. The enemy encounters & the boss fights are the weakest parts of the game with most enemies don't really have any health about are killed using spikes or pits. To get to the final boss you also have to do the majority of stages including the remix ones which doesn't lead to many freedom to explore like say the 3D Mario games. Still this game has a lot of content with the remix stages, collectables, Demon Tower side mode & the Neon Splash DLC.

Cute li'l game! There's a really strong core to this game's flow and momentum, especially where standard platforming meshes with the transformations. I'm not sure it really clicks until you leave the first world's small dusty canyons, but each level is a ton of fun as a big, biiiiiig obstacle course. I especially like some of the beach levels that just keep going and going, or some of the levels where you're rolling down a long highway. The dynamic checkpoint system also lends itself to a lot of fun experimentation with your comfort level in how you progress through a level. Visuals are fun, too, even if it's not a personal favorite aesthetic. Still, plenty of cute hidden details if you're looking around.. It is pretty impressive how naturally billboarded sprites like this work for a 3D platformer with such a robust moveset. Good stuff!

Hot damn, I love games that love being the game that they are, and Demon Turf is just that: a song sung for 3D Mario in particular and 3D platformers in general.

The movement? So good, a trimmed down version of Super Mario Odyssey. Camera? Not perfect, but when are they ever. It does its job, and outside of the mild annoyance of swooping down low for triggered events was never really a nuisance. So the core is good, great even. How's the rest?

Generous. Overflowing. Levels, remixed levels, race courses, challenge courses, weird golf, enemy arenas, photo hunt, time trials, a dedicated Getting Over It tower. The collectibles are perfect. Minor ones are for cosmetics, major ones for upgrades, and the ones needed for progression are simply earned by beating the stage. You can care exactly as much as you want about them.

It's also all unobtrusive, readily obtained. Looking for collectibles? They give you an arrow pointing to the closest one. Don't like the dialog? Almost entirely avoidable, with a fast skip when it's not. Don't want to traipse around the hubs? It's all accessible from the pause menu. All those side activities? Available right away, save for one that unlocks after the first world. Demon Turf loves what it is, and wants you to play it. It doesn't stop you every 30 seconds to show you how cute or clever it is, and I deeply appreciate that.

It's not perfect, though. The combat is just there. Not necessary, but I like that they were trying something new. The final ability is janky and slows you down when the others all serve to speed you up. There's some level design fatigue toward the end. The bosses are generally great, but the final one is a bit of a victory lap. Doesn't matter, because the real boss is the level leading up to him. Subway Surfing exists as a level, and I actively hated it. Some people don't like having to do the remix levels to beat the game, but honestly, I loved them. Why wouldn't I? More game, harder movement, genuinely different challenges.

It is, genuinely, the best 3D platformer I've played in years despite its faults. Clears A Hat in Time based solely on how seamless the entire experience is, and for not wanting to be my least favorite 3D Mario.