Devil Daggers

It'd be irresponsible to recommend anyone purchase Devil Daggers. It'd be an outright lie to say that Devil Daggers is a pleasant experience. From top to bottom, every part of the game is a hellish, fever nightmare-evoking trip to Satan's backyard, where you're forced to watch replays of the dedicated handful who are far more talented at the wave-based shooter than you can possibly imagine.

Of course, those despondent lows will make that occasional high of reaching a new level of power, of beating a friend's high score, or when the game finally clicks all the more ball-bustingly orgasmic.

The first thing you'll notice about Devil Daggers is the solid artistic direction. Shovel Knight was kind of the last hurrah for pixel art indie games, as the glut of retro-styled bite-size experiments are moving towards intentionally low-polygon models. Frankly, it'd be a welcome change were it not for the near-complete lack of textures--games look more like collections for the Fighting Polygon Team than actual early-3D Playstation games, like Spyro the Dragon. It's a little thing with regards to artistic design, but does a whole lot to make Devil Daggers feel like a lost arcade game from the 90s.

The other major part of the arcade feel of Devil Daggers is the only tangible goal--a high score. There story of Devil Daggers is impossible to spoil, since there isn't really one. There's no characterization, no dramatic story arc, no damsels in distress; there's only you, a metric fuckton of monsters, and your daggers. It's a wave-based shooter where the only breaks between waves are when you're left staring at the scoreboard, and you'll be looking at it pretty often, since you die in one hit. At times, I almost felt like I had suddenly stumbled into some kind of 3D bullet hell relic will how often I found myself weaving between the ever-pursuing skulls and demons. The enemies, ranging from flying skulls to horrifying, colossal centipedes are already unsettling enough to look at. When any one of them could instantly end a potentially awesome run prematurely, you quickly learn to fear them.

You can dread an enemy without them actually threatening you, however. There's an immense spider that's accompanied by a sickening macaroni-stirring noise (and yes, I'm upset that video exists too) that I don't think has ever killed me. I'm not sure if it actually can, but I hate that thing more than anything else I've come up against because the spider can steal your gems. Every enemy except for the plain-jane flying skull mooks drops at least one gem when you kill them, which fly towards you so you can collect them if you stop firing for a second. If you get enough of the gems--I've only ever gotten 10 or so--the screen will flash red, your hand will open up, and you'll fire even more daggers than before. It's a huge power upgrade and suddenly the game becomes easier until you're overwhelming with the swarms of enemies. As such, an enemy that can steal your gems and leave you high and dry for when the next wave comes will quickly become the dreaded.

I've never fought that centipede, by the way. I know it has a whole bunch of gems on it's underside, and you can position yourself correctly and just obliterate him, but I've only ever gotten just past the first spider wave. I only know it exists thanks to the replay system. You can download replays of a player's run, usually the highest-scoring, and watch how they became the current highest-scoring player in this incredibly difficult and frustrating game. The replays seem to serve two purposes; to teach you strategies for improving at the game, and to make you feel like a goddamn idiot. Some games are so technically and mechanically precise, like Dwarf Fortress, where you'll watch high level play and be totally baffled at what's going on. The best handful of Devil Daggers players are so emasculating for the exact opposite reason; the simplicity of this game goes all the way down to the gameplay. There's a certain Quake-like drift and learn when you walk to the left and right, and you only ever have two attacks: hold the left button on your mouse down for continuous fire, or click it for a shotgun. Those gem-based upgrades I talked about earlier? All they do is make you fire more. No difference in strength, or some bizarre piercing ability, at least as far as I've seen. Eventually you can click the right button for homing shots, but it looks like whoever's gotten that far depends mostly on the main dagger-fire. The comparison to Quake holds up further, since you can do a sort of rocket jump with the shotgun, but I've only ever seen it used to bide time, never for anything practical.

It'd be easy to say that Devil Daggers is little more than gambling, putting you entirely at the hands of the god of RNG and praying that an errant skull doesn't pop up behind you, but there's definitely a skill element to it. Learning how to kite the skulls, where to keep your mouse to take down the spider, exact maneuvering--it's all stuff you learn on your own and get progressively higher scores, though maybe not as fast as you might wish. That's the root of the main problem with Devil Daggers, it's at times too punishing, too frustrating. From kind of mastered determining just how much of the stick the player can take with as little carrot as possible, and sometimes Devil Daggers goes a little too far. Especially early on, you don't get that heroin high of 10 gems when you feel you deserve it. It's an unfortunate, frustrating misstep in an addicting game that's incredibly easy to accidentally pour an hour into.

Which is why it's irresponsible to recommend Devil Daggers to your friends. You'll be forever chasing a dragon of getting the next gems, thinking of how awesome it'd be to be on top of the leaderboards, teased into it by how deceptively simple the gameplay is, how precisely the sound design will give you nightmares, and ultimately fall down a deep, deep hole of horror on par with Requiem for a Dream.