Isaac Newton was once moved to put a thick needle or a large, dull sewing needle behind his eye. Where exactly? (I think you’ll want to be precise.) “As close as possible between my eyes and my bones [the] Do my best. “It’s a pretty big deal for yourself, but Newton was stubborn.
Newton was fascinated by phosphenes, crazy bursts of scattered light when you press your palm against your eye and disrupt your optic nerve. Light in the dark: You can see why this imbalance can make Newton a little grumpy. But here’s the magic of it: These rolling, tunneling, checkerboard-like passages seem to open up between you and the world around you. magic.
Would Isaac Newton like a supervillain? I’ll leave this to others to judge. But super demons of course love phosphenes. This incredibly fast-scoring micro-shooter wraps its foes in the shimmering pinks and dirty golds that phosphenes love to trade. It wraps everything in a fisheye lens, the most objectionable of all, just to give you that extra feeling of being trapped deep in something, under the skin or in the depths of the ocean. Horned skulls, praying hands, sparkling diamonds shattered on impact. Forget Newton, Super Demon made me realize how sad it was that Hieronymus Bosch never did a season of Juicy Couture.
There are warnings that such a game is coming. Devil’s Dagger, another score-pulling microshooter that ripped up Steam a few years ago, comes from the same developer and has the same DNA. The dark arena from which medieval nightmares emerge, deadly firepower is in your outstretched hands.
What’s the difference here? I’d love to say that Super Demon takes a deeper look at what’s implied in Demon Daggers and makes them explicit. It feels like the first step in the design – I could be wrong – is to look at how the demon dagger plays the game and maybe, who knows, how really stupid players approach it and see what opportunities there are – just what it takes A little push.
So beyond the lacquered phosphorite sheen applied to the itchy enemy polygons from the original game, Hyper Demon tells you more about what you can do. Bunny-hopping and Rocket-jump – jumps powered by shooting to the ground – I think both are lifts from Devil Daggers, but I don’t recall any skill that allows your secondary weapon beam to bounce off the ground to lock on when it bounces enemy. Air sprint? Mario weights? Maybe it’s in the demon dagger! But now there is a tutorial mode, so you can’t avoid it.
Oh yes, the score counts down when you don’t bring it up, so I ended the bad game with a negative number. But that’s the core of the whole experience, and it’s probably something I haven’t made clear. Super Demons are fast – when you’re just starting out, a round can be as fast as a GIF: spawn, kill, die, all before your watch’s second hand actually moves (unless it’s automatic). And that speed, this series of games that ended and returned to the leaderboards before I even noticed they had started, trained me in a few furious hours to understand what I thought it was.
So it’s a shooter, but I think its DNA is really in the skateboard game Tony Hawk or something like that. You know the feeling you get in skateboarding, the chance to do something dizzying and get a very, very big score, right next to you, but doesn’t it come to you without a hitch? You know every second you don’t score is dead time, wasted, and hateful? Did you know that feeling of self-expression, chain action, all-out effort is the real way to play a game? This is Tony Hawk and the Super Demon. I ran for maybe two or three seconds and felt like I was starting to get it right – it was really chaining together a glorious combo and dodging.
How did you come up with this combo? Learn about each enemy, learn what to do with the Praying Hand and the diamonds it contains, how to use the diamonds, whether to smash them or throw them away, how to kite tumbling skulls, how to dodge just right, how to do it all Improvisation encounters scenes. Ultimately, you also have to learn how to read colors: translate phosphenes! Sometimes I think video games are never short of new ideas.
So Hyper Demon offers very short games, but they give you the feeling that they contain decades of action, as long as you can slow them down and read the game correctly. It’s a small download, but in the cursed darkness it feels glorious, terribly expansive. It’s old fun – shooting, dodging, scoring – but in its near-chaotic moments, it’s laughably short (fake short for me at least; I’m sure some players can string it together) up for a full few minutes), it demands mastery and feels not only modern, but like a game from the future. A scary future, of course, but at least the light display will be very special.
