This Halloween month's seen killer sharks, demons, and ghosts on IGotW so what better way to end than with, uh, more demons? Demon Turf is a 3D platformer from Fabraz and Playtonic Friends with a sorta Doom-ish aesthetic by way of PaRappa the Rapper. It uses 2D sprites against 3D environments, possibly as a means to keep the game running as fluidly as possible as that would be paramount for the type of game it is: one of those "git gud" platformers with time trials and the like, albeit a rare 3D variant. Demon Turf sees the diminutive "Beebz" decide to topple the Demon King from his throne after a perceived slight by methodically defeating his four lieutenants and taking enough batteries to power up the gate leading into the Demon King's castle, wherein she plans to beat his ass. The game is split into four hub worlds (plus a more general town hub full of vendors, mini-games, and other bonuses) and each of those four has seven regular stages and one boss stage. Upon defeating the boss, the seven normal stages are remixed to be harder and have more collectibles on offer, essentially expanding the number to fifteen per world (and sixty overall). They're the mostly linear type of "obstacle course" platforming levels, popularized by the likes of Super Mario Galaxy or Super Mario 3D World, and in addition to sweeping up a set of sweet-based collectibles there's also a time trial for every stage to overcome as well, though both of these additional objectives are optional.

So, starting with the good. The controls and platforming are generally excellent, though often they're not quite sharp enough for the demanding tasks of some of the tougher challenges I've encountered so far. It's sort of like a luxury car in a racing game: mostly does the job for any task you give it, though it leaves you wanting something with a little more horsepower for the truly demanding courses. The traversal upgrades you earn while playing are a bit more mixed though: the hookshot's fine, even if it has a slightly annoying quirk where you can't use it after a double-jump, but the fast wheel transformation is really awkward to control due to the inconsistent rules regarding its momentum. I'm a fan of the aesthetic and the general vibe of the underworld being this place of mostly passive assholes always on each other's case—kinda reminds me of Disgaea, even—but the 2D sprites can be a bit limiting in certain conditions (like, say, if someone's directly below you they tend to appear as a straight line; fortunately, all the collectibles have 3D models so they don't suffer from this "dimensional blindness"). Musically, it's very reminiscent of Splatoon: the tracks have this hip-hop bouncy irreverence to them with distorted vocals that aren't completely crystal, but you can just about make out what they're saying.

As is often the case, there's not so much any one significant failing but a legion of minor annoyances that eventually aggregate into a big snowball of displeasure. For one, I've never been a fan of taking time trials and making them part of the 100% progression in a collectathon platformer, albeit while still not part of the critical path to the end of the game. Time trials are divisive things that I personally find annoying to deal with in part because they're usually mutually exclusive to hunting collectibles—you can encourage players to explore or dash to the end but not both, also the fundamental flaw of the whole Sonic franchise—which means playing every course at least twice, but also because you can waste so much time getting through the longer levels only to discover close to the end that the time target has passed. The game also lets you set your own checkpoints similar to Fred Wood's Love series of lo-fi masocore platformers, but for as generous as this feature might seem it's also something that will slip your mind a lot while playing and so you'll often find yourself cursing your own carelessness after being sent back to the start of the level from a mistimed jump. Speaking of which, this game has a bad case of what I call "Media Moleculeitis": by which I don't mean that you got so pissy that no-one bought your game maker that so you go three years without announcing anything and are forced to decimate your staff, but rather the situation when you build all your platforms with rounded edges to make them more "whimsical" and the result is that players reach the platforms by a matter of pixels and watch helplessly as the character slides off these curved edges to their deaths rather than celebrating what should've been a comforting near-miss. I also don't particularly care for the combat: the usual way to complete any given beatdown is to push enemies off cliffs or into deadly zones (they tend to be spikes or flames with a red tint so you know they're fatal) by using either quick or charged punching attacks with increasing levels of knockback. What this essentially means is that success in combat often boils down to a physics engine playing nice, which they so rarely do, and praying to Baphomet or whomever will listen that enemies don't hit the corner of something and go flying off at an undesired tangent or get stuck against a wall (and yes, this unpredictable awkwardness synergizes quite nicely with the time trial feature on levels with a lot of combat encounters, thank you for your query). Finally, Demon Turf also has that double-edged sword of having a lot of "ideas": I'm sure you know the type of game experience I speak of, where the designers took every conceit for a level they had on the whiteboard in the meeting room and ended up with a significantly skewed hit-or-miss ratio. It feels like only the Mario team can change the script every level and still come out smelling like roses each time; everyone else runs into issues with certain one-and-done stage props or features that aren't prolific enough to warrant the attention when it's crunch time for the design and QA teams, unlike the more vital game-wide stuff to get right like the controls or any major glitches. Oh, and just one last extra thing: the boss fights are straight trash. I could elaborate, but I've gone overlong here so just trust me.

I could go on and on (I decided to mercifully end that last paragraph at a little over 500 words) but even if the game does all it can to frustrate me on the regular—and it certainly won't stop doing so as I enter its latter half and the increased challenge that'll present—it has a moxie, a creative streak, and a general competency to it that I can't completely dislike. When you're just running and jumping around the game doesn't feel half-bad at all. If you want an idea, start with something fundamentally sound like a 3D Mario and add both a double-jump and a spin move that operates like a flutter jump or glide in mid-air, and the order you do the double-jump and spin produces different effects: going spin then double-jump boosts you forward, making it ideal for long horizontal gaps, while ending with the spin makes it much easier to carefully land on smaller platforms. The camera's somehow not awful—at least, I've had no issues with it, which is very rare for this genre—and run attempts can be reset quickly when you need them to be. The main town hub also has a ton of side-stuff for you to get distracted by, from specially tough levels, arena challenges (skip those), photography missions that offer a bit of a scavenger hunt puzzle, something called Demon Soccer Golf (skip that too), and many cosmetics and minor upgrades to purchase with your hard-earned candy collectibles. A traversal upgrade grants you the means of playing certain levels with props that need those upgrades but they can also help with time trials in a more general sense too; I've decided to put off the tougher courses in case I get another traversal ability later that'll make it easier to beat the timer.

I may have kvetched for like five minutes straight up there, but I choose to see that as a sign that I've become invested in this scrappy little 3D platformer (though I say "little" only in relation to the budget on display; the game is extremely beefy when it comes to the sheer amount of content and I don't doubt for a moment the accuracy of the HowLongToBeat estimate of 35 hours for full completion, which is just a little over that for Donkey Kong 64) and I only yearn for it to be better because I plan to stick with it for the long run to see where it goes and what it does next. There's no doubt in my mind that the team behind this knew exactly what kind of game they wanted to make and deeply loved the genre conventions they were invoking, and boy is that enthusiasm infectious; there's just these moments when I think about dipping and waiting for the more proficient sequel so I won't get vexed by some absolute horsepoop quite so often.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Post-Playthrough Edit: Yeah, the game getting harder didn't really do its faults any favors. That's the kind of thing that tends to get magnified the more insistent the game demands on the player to do well. Also, if there are three rules for games that include time trials, they are A) don't make the levels too long because it's annoying to repeat too much content over and over, B) don't include a bunch of moving platforms and devices you have to wait on as the timer continues to tick along, and C) don't have too much of an RNG aspect to certain elements where a random arbitrary occurrence might kill an otherwise promising run. Demon Turf breaks all three towards the end. If it'd just decided to be more like a chill Banjo-Kazooie type similar to Hell Pie or most other Indie 3D platformers I imagine I'd be far more forgiving, but it's just such a frustrating mess at times despite its imagination and charming aesthetic.