Market forces by and large have directed video game design to lean into systems that facilitate a steady drip feed of random rewards long before I was cognizant enough to realize what the hell was going on. The only thing keeping me from burning my time and money on gacha is that their thin veneer of gameplay cannot deceive dopamine receptors long since fried by tens of thousands of hours of Team Fortress 2. A five star SSR roll would need to include the opportunity to kill a man for real for a brain like that to be tricked into thinking looking at spreadsheets constitutes gameplay. Hyper Demon does not have smoking hot anime babes, one of a handful of minor flaws, but the satisfaction of climbing the leaderboard comes close to the exhilaration of one. They even hid a real game behind it.

Not a single element in Hyper Demon exists without a reason. And every mechanic and player input serves multiple purposes. Every action you take is part of an intricately designed network of decisions that at the same time feels limitless and can comfortably fit in your head.

I honestly, genuinely don't know how they did it. All I know is I've spent 30 hours playing a game that can be finished in under 4 minutes and I don't plan to stop anytime soon. It's some of the best first person shooting action I've ever experienced.

Beware of the lengthy tutorial. You can jump into the game without fully finishing it, but should at some point go back to it to grasp some of the more nuanced mechanics.

there's a divine sickness here

kaleidostepping thru wormholes and slipgates as glass contortionist. future ghosts looming in red silhouettes. shapeless forms ticking down toward birth. a remote viewer orbiting above a shrinking planet. a killing field itinerary. liquid gold warping into sinister geometries as you try to claw sand back into a broken hourglass

so thoroughly enveloping as to be transportive; the exit back to common sensation being as disorienting as the ominous entrance. delayed anxiety and nausea upon release from cruel hypnosis. rewriting neural pathways with everything you don't want in your brain

long live the new flesh

I mean, wow? I'm honestly not sure what else I can say.

I refrained from waxing poetic on Devil Daggers because I was afraid of betraying what the game is for me at its core. I found it refreshingly simple while still being sophisticated in execution, and while I have seen plenty of talented individuals who have spent countless hours polishing their play to a mirror sheen, it was never much more than a simple time-waster for me. An excellent one, but not the kind of game so remarkable as to keep me hooked the way some others of its ilk have.

So when I first saw a listing for Hyper Demon, I instinctively cocked an eyebrow. I wasn't really sold on the idea of a sequel or successor to Devil Daggers, if only because I wasn't sure what a new game could bring to the table that a sizeable update couldn't. At least, not without compromising what seemed to make Devil Daggers special in the first place. But I looked into it regardless.

Upon viewing various trailers and gameplay videos for Hyper Demon, I was... Confused. This was unquestionably the work of Devil Daggers' creator, and without doubt a re-iteration of that game's core concept. But what was I actually looking at? Somewhere in that swirling sea of pearlescent light was a player, doing... Things. And tried as I might, I just could not parse the action happening before my eyes. Where Devil Daggers had served as a strange sort of zen experience for me, I couldn't help but feel a tinge of anxiety seeing Hyper Demon in motion. It felt like setting George Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte next to Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. If you were to describe the scenes depicted as laconically as possible, they might sound much the same, but a cursory examination of each painting makes it abundantly clear they're radically different in tone and theming. I was apprehensive as I pulled the trigger on Hyper Demon, feeling quite certain it wasn't going to appeal the same way as Sorath's maiden title.

And yeah, upon seeing the multi-part tutorial, those apprehensions were very much reinforced. The fact there was a tutorial at all was a bit of a surprise, but in progressing through them I started to realize just how different of a animal this game was going to be. All of these new movement mechanics, on top of the ways you interact with your enemies, demanded a lot more out of me than the simple strafe-jump-shoot fundamentals of the original.

After checking off each box, I proceeded to step into my first game and I was annihilated almost immediately. On repeated attempts, I found that while I might have been able to survive longer, that wasn't good enough anymore. My score would continue to tick down unless my demon-slaying skills impressed. I persevered for a few more runs, struggling to place anywhere north of 30 points, before I started to feel this strange tingling in my brain. That itching, sneaking sensation that I've become more intimately familiar with as time has gone on. Is this game just not for me? Was it the elegant simplicity of Devil Daggers that had hooked me the first time? Had Hyper Demon managed to overcomplicate what was, to me, the almost platonic ideal of first person shooters? I sat back in my chair for a second and thought about it. Then I set the game aside briefly and went back to watch the gameplay videos I'd seen before.

All of a sudden, everything was so clear. Even with the thirty minutes or so I'd spent with the game, I had been gifted enough insight to comprehend the true form of the beast. New ideas were already emerging on how I could improve upon my score and watch my name ascend the leaderboard at breakneck speed.

Hyper Demon manages to be a successor to Devil Daggers while also being its antithesis. Daggers wants you to survive, Demon wants you to perform. Daggers splashes bright reds against a dim and dreary backdrop, providing perfect contrast. Demon is a kaleidoscope of color and fear. Daggers pares down FPS gameplay to its barest aspects. Demon gives you swath of new tricks and rules, and then demands that you respect them.

The current world record for Devil Daggers is roughly twenty minutes.

The current world record run for Hyper Demon is like a minute and a half.

Huh.

At any rate, I'm going to need to spend some more time with it at some point because I have definitely not played enough to decide where it stands amongst other games in my mind. It's quite obvious that while both Devil Daggers and Hyper Demon seek the same goal, they go about achieving them in meaningfully different ways. But I felt the need to say now that even if it ends up not having quite the same appeal for me, I can still appreciate Hyper Demon for what it is: A feast for the senses that is definitely one of the coolest games I've seen in recent memory.

I love hyper demon (HD). It improved upon the core appeal of devil daggers (DD) while fixing some of its biggest flaws. I believe it's one of the best spiritual sequels ever made (in the ballpark of DOOM, Dark Souls, and Bayonetta).

I saw the following one sentence 1.5 star review on here recently:
"Hey remember when the first game didn't need pages and pages of tutorials"

This review is funny to me because it isolates one of the biggest flaws of DD but touts it as something essential. DD didn't have a tutorials menu. But what is a tutorial? Is it just something the game labels as 'tutorial'? Must a tutorial be separate from the game proper? I don't think so; I argue that DD's first few minutes serves as enemy tutoriaIs in all except name. Among many other changes that improve replayability, HD extracts and largely removes these enemy tutorials. I only played each of the tutorials in HD once. However, because they are inextricably baked into DD, I played each of the enemy tutorials in DD hundreds of times. Am I supposed to believe this is a good thing?

It is common now for people (including the 1.5 star reviewer above) to believe that the 'correct' way to design games is to have seamless, built-in 'tutorials' that show the player how to interact with something rather than telling them. Ideally, these don't bring attention to themselves and are thus not labeled by the game as tutorials. It works great for many games, but DD->HD highlights a way in which a more 'traditional' approach to tutorials can be better for replayability. It's difficult to hide/obscure a tutorial and also make it optional because an unknowing/first-time player won't know not to skip it. This means that hidden tutorials are often mandatory, ensuring that experienced players still have to go through the tutorial even though they won't gain anything from it. DD has an extreme version of this, in my view. Sorath (DD/HD dev) recognized this, removed the tutorials and made them optional. In doing so, they had to reveal the tutorials as what they are which is maybe not ideal but, in my opinion, is completely worth it for the boost to replayability of HD over DD. You only live for a limited amount of time, please don't spend it replaying tutorials.