HYPER DEMON Review (PC)
Summary: Not for the faint of heart, mind or body, HYPER DEMON builds on the Devil Daggers formula, for whatever that means.
3.8
Cheaper than syrup of ipecac, at least.
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to either,
- Have a terrifying near-death experience you’re likely to get after consuming exactly 9.9 grams of pure caffeine on a bet,
- Play a regular horde shooter while on a very bad acid trip,
- Have an autistic meltdown, whilst also projectile vomiting, or,
- All of the above at once?
Well, wonder no further, as some absolute madman has managed to condense the above into videogame form. That game is HYPER DEMON, a game from a couple of years ago by the same developer as the well-acclaimed Devil Daggers. I can only surmise that the target audience for this game is people who have played so much Counter-Strike that they find any and all FPS games banal, and desire as much concentrated challenge as possible, or wish to detonate their brain in the fastest possible way.
“Be not afraid”, my eye!
HYPER DEMON is not a game that carries itself by its story. There is one (the game promises), but it’s very deliberately vague and esoteric, meaning that, by and large, it’s carried by its relatively easy-to-explain gameplay. It plays very similarly to its predecessor Devil Daggers: your character, whoever on God’s green earth or beyond they are, has the ability to shoot daggers out of their hands at blindingly fast speeds and bounce around with the agility of a gazelle while doing so, and has elected to use this ability to, as one Steam reviewer puts it, “Kill God as fast as you can.” Various Biblically accurate-looking enemies, which the developer has chosen to number 1-5 rather than name, surround you on all sides and your job is to kill them, over and over again. The aforementioned dagger-throwing is not your only weapon in this doomed crusade though: each of the main enemies has a different means by which it can be subdued. One of them can be killed instantly by shooting the crystal in its head with a laser, obtained by absorbing other crystals dropped by defeated enemies, another can be more easily killed if you first force it to land by dashing underneath it or getting close enough to it, another can be stunned, then bounced off to gain some extra height, and each one can just as “easily” (this is in quotation marks for a reason) be hammered with daggers until it dies.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA– *heavy breathing* –AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA…
That is to say, nothing about this game is easy, not by a light year, or perhaps even a light millennium. Again much like its predecessor, this game is not for the faint of heart, mind, stomach or temperament. It demands lightning-fast reaction times and the quick thinking of a machine learning PC doing a simple maths problem. I even found the game’s optional tutorial to be difficult, what with the objectives actually requiring you to get dangerously close to some of the enemies in order to provoke their very specific reactions to your doing so. So suffice to say it ain’t easy on the brain, and more to the point, it isn’t easy on the eyes or ears either. The visuals and audio in this game appear to have been carefully calculated to be as overstimulating as possible, with various roars, shrieks and groans all sounding at once alongside the rushes and bangs of your attacks and movements.
What running on half an hour of sleep and a single Tim Tam looks like.
In HYPER DEMON I think I might have found one of the rare cases where a game is so good, it’s bad. It’s absolutely stunningly made by all accounts, but at the cost of broader accessibility to anyone who values their sanity. It takes everything that makes an FPS fun, ups the dosage by a factor of about 1000, then dares you to slam down a whole pint of the resulting concoction in one go. Some people may very well enjoy it for this very reason. For this particular writer however, the 90%-by-volume cocktail of cacophonous sound, intense difficulty and distorted visuals produces a somewhat similar kind of overstimulation in my brain to that of a particularly stressful day at work. Go ahead and play it, if you’re braver than I.
About the Author
Edward Gosling Ed has been playing games since he was in primary school, and now has a Steam library of over 2000 games, only a fraction of which he has actually played!
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