SCHLOCKTOBER '21:This October I have been playing a number of games with Halloween appropriate themes, focusing on older and less appreciated games in my backlog. These aren't necessarily horror games but rather games with strong horror elements. I've decided to blog about these games and whether I think they're still worth playing as a seasonal treat or the gaming equivalent of an apple full of razor blades.
Shadows of the Damned is all style and no substance, but it does the style part so well it doesn't really matter.
For a B-game that went a little bit under the radar Shadows of the Damned has an impressive pedigree. It was made by Suda 51 and Shinji Mikami, a team-up that created previous cult hit Killer7 and who are both famous designers in their own right, and published by EA. A supernatural third person shooter by the guy behind Resident Evil 4 is always going to get attention, and there was buzz about the game prior to release. It scored in the high 70s on Metacritic and didn’t set the world on fire commercially, and despite praise for its humor and characters, including from Giant Bomb, it seems to have been forgotten relatively quickly. It did make the backwards compatibility list for Xbox, and I picked it up digitally for $5 a few years ago, though it has since been delisted. I played on an Xbox Series X and while it worked well for the most part there were a few technical issues with dialog cutting off and the like that might not have been in the original.
So what is Shadows of the Damned, other than the game that gave us the indelible video game name of Garcia Fucking Hotspur? It’s a third person shooter that’s structured unlike any other I can think of on the 7th generation of consoles. You play as Hotspur, a demon hunter whose girlfriend is kidnapped by Fleming, the Lord of Hell in the opening sequence, and who pursues her into the Underworld alongside his faithful floating skull/weapon Johnson to try and get her back. This set up is a reminiscent of a game EA put out a year earlier called Dante’s Inferno, except that instead of being based on a narrative poem from the Middle Ages it’s based on a series of dick jokes. The game does not take itself seriously at all and pitches its tone squarely on the comedy side of the horror-comedy scale, even if it has explicit references to the much scarier Evil Dead franchise.
Garcia’s trek through the underworld plays out as a series of self-contained stages with self-contained areas that often involve some kind of combat or puzzle challenge, or a mix of the two. The structure of the game feels archaic even by 2011 standards, with minimal backtracking and exploration and no real attempt to establish a sense of place, just a series of areas to blast through and a few collectables scattered here and there to find. It even has arcadey sounds as you pass through doors into a new area or unlock the path forward, and in some ways it seems to be dipping a toe into the idea of an arcade throwback mixed with full 3D third person action that Suda51 would explore more thoroughly in 2016’s Let It Die. It’s fascinating that the designer of Resident Evil, one of the earliest 3D games to focus heavily on backtracking and a sense of place, would work on such a self-conscious comedic parody in the same genre, but he did and they went all in.
The shooting in the game feels fairly standard for the time, with an over the shoulder camera, the ability to aim down sights and still move while doing so, a dodge roll and 180 turn button, and alternate fires for some of the guns. You can also aim at individual body parts, which is sometimes required to defeat shielded enemies but is also used for headshots or to blow the legs off bad guys so you can stomp them. You also have a “light shot” that serves to hit switches and stun enemies, as well as strip darkness shields away from certain bad guys to make them vulnerable. The game’s darkness mechanic comes into play in a number of ways, forcing the player to scramble for an exit or a goat head candelabra to ignite and dispel it, but also sometimes aiding the player by making certain switches accessible that are shielded in light, or killing some larger enemies outright. It feels like this mechanic could have been explored even more deeply, but it at least serves to give the gameplay a sense of identity that lesser third person shooters couldn’t muster. Sequences where you have to let a demon monkey extinguish a goat candelabra so you can get some darkness in order to hit a switch or kill a large enemy, and then need to relight the candelabra before the darkness itself kills you, are unlike any other shooter I can think of. The game also features lots of boss battles, many of which use darkness mechanics in creative ways.
Interestingly you don’t actually collect weapons in the game but instead find gems to upgrade Johnson, who shapeshifts into your whole arsenal. You start with a pistol and a slug thrower shotgun, then add a machine gun and find two upgrades for each of these weapons. There's enough variety to keep things moving but really any weapon will serve in pretty much any situation and in the big battles there's enough ammo dropped that you can play however you want and it will probably be viable.
The problem with the gameplay is that it’s all a bit clunky, especially the camera in the often quite cramped areas, and requires you not only to use control sticks to fine tune your aim and hit small glowing red gems on a moving enemy, but to pump round after round into them because almost every enemy in the game other than the most basic fodder is a massive bullet sponge. Boss battles are especially guilty of this. They’re not difficult, since they generally have slow patterns that are easy to read and avoid, and there’s lots of health around, but they’re incredibly tedious. These are the kinds of boss battles where you not only have to figure out what you should do and then execute it, but you have to execute it over and over and over with only minor changes until the boss finally dies. Most of the boss fights are simple, long, and pretty annoying, but that’s also true of many of the game’s later encounters, which throw waves of enemies at you over and over, none of which are particular threats given how many healing items you can get, but all of which take a long time to kill.
Shadows of the Damned has good enough gameplay that it never quite gets boring, since the game breaks up the pacing with puzzle sections and mini games (including a horizontal shooter sequence, some horrible chase sequences that I died on more than any other part of the game, and a static shooting gallery level) but the clunky controls and camera mixed with the bullet sponge enemies and low difficulty means that it’s not thrilling to play either. It’s a good thing that the aesthetic and storytelling are substantially better.
If Shadows of the Damned’s gameplay is pretty standard with a few twists, its aesthetic is a goofy gorehound’s delight. The environments are mostly nothing special, with lots of run down villages and swamps to trek through, but the character and enemy designs are all so over the top that it’s hard not to keep playing just to see what happens next. Garcia and Johnson share good chemistry, but everyone that they run into, from bosses to the weird demon merchant Christopher to the occasional NPC have designs and personality that burst with madcap creative energy. One boss wears the flesh of his victims in chunks all over his body, repeats “fuck you” over and over again in response to basically any stimulus, and eats his own heart to turn into a giant bird. Another is an opera singing demon you pursue off and on through much of the game.
While there isn’t really any environmental storytelling in the typical sense, there are lots of cool gross things to see, like rooms full of human remains and random heads rolling around, and there are also posters and books that can be examined to have Johnson tell you a little bit of lore or read you a children’s story that explains one of the boss’s origins back before they got turned into a demon. The stories are a particular highlight, with Johnson giving the occasional snide remark as he reads, and lots of sick macabre details that make you want to keep playing to see what’s next.
And that’s really the appeal of Shadows of the Damned. The opportunity to experience whatever weird detail or character or piece of dialog is around the next corner. The gameplay is reasonably fun, but pretty repetitive and at times irritating, but it’s really just scaffolding for the madness of the various gross out gags and weirdness. Seeing as the game is currently delisted from digital services (though there are rumors of a remaster since the developers re-acquired the property) and is very expensive physically, I’d recommend checking out a playthrough online if you don’t already own a copy. It’s one of those games where actually playing it is the least interesting part.
Schlocktober Rating: Very Good Schlock. This is the best kind of schlock. It’s not a great game but it’s a fun ride with enough memorable parts that it will stick with you for a while. When people complain about how the 7th generation was mostly brown and grey shooters they should remember games like this, which were wildly creative and unabashedly weird but didn’t get much traction because they weren’t quite as smooth or polished as the AAA games that have, at this point, mostly eaten the big publisher side of the industry. People talk about how it’s the gameplay parts of a video game that really matter, and I agree with that most of the time, but sometimes great presentation can elevate pedestrian gameplay. That’s the case here. In terms of Halloween candy, this is like a big Reese’s cup or a Milky Way. It’s not gourmet stuff but it’s highly enjoyable to gobble down.
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