Have you ever wondered what it would be like to fall into a black hole? Then Hyper Demon is a game for you. Playing it is like dancing on the edge of reality. Perspective, time and space are all shattered as you push the boundaries of conventional shoot ’em ups, leaving their corridors, cover and battles in the dust. It’s essentially about chasing high scores and beating monsters, something games have done since the beginning, but like best-in-class high-score fighters Thumper and Tetris Effect, the execution turns this template into something dreamy. Edge magazine might never have bothered to ask “if only you could talk to these creatures” if the violence in the 1994 shooters had been as transcendent as it was in Hyper Demon.
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What is it? A score-based first person shooter
Expect to pay: £11.39 | $14.99
Developer: Sorath
Publisher: Sorath
Judged by: Intel i7-4790k, Nvidia GeForce GTX-970, 16GB RAM
Multiplayer? no
Clutch: Steam (opens in new tab)
Hyper Demon’s menu alone was enough to get me excited. The electronic, angelic music and oil shimmer colors swirling in the title, stylized “HYPER DEMON”, explain the intensity with which this game will work. And yet it begins in a small patch of light where birds gather around a twisted dagger. I love this moment of calm before every run: a little ritual you have to perform to summon your strength for what’s to come.
Sorath’s last game, Devil Daggers, distilled Doom and Quake into a pure and haunted shoot-’em-up with responsive, simple violence in a stripped-down but evocative audiovisual landscape. No key card chases, no lame story… nothing but shoot and survive in an infinite darkness full of undead ghosts. All the echoes of growls and screams, bones slamming against stone. Firing a stream of hot knives into the skulls emerging from the shadows.
How far could you go in the face of it? Most only last a few seconds on their first try. The world record is 20 minutes.
Unlike Devil Daggers, Hyper Demon is not about survival. It’s about blooming. Scoring this time isn’t based on how long you can live, but on how fast you can put down ethereal beasts. The more you can cut in a shorter time, the higher your score. The bigger the sample, the better. Some of my best runs lasted just seconds. Devil Daggers had the feeling of being trapped in a nightmarish basement with infinite horrors, but the atmosphere in Hyper Demon is very much: “I’m not locked here with you, you’re locked here with me.”
To that end, the arsenal at your disposal is a little more extensive than it was in Devil Daggers, although the games are very similar. In first person, you shoot daggers from your ethereal hand with two firing ranges, a machine gun and a shotgun blast, now complemented by special laser beam attacks performed by sucking up gems and other powerups (alternatively, they can be absorbed for special effects) . Moving is more than hopping; you can shoot yourself in the air with explosion on the ground and run to dodge out of the way of enemies.
Mastering these skills is made a lot easier with a tutorial mode that walks you through each element individually. Hyper Demon seems like an unruly cacophony at first, but a fine level of control is possible if you can grab it. Just pointing and shooting will keep your runs in the negative score. Mastery requires you to take out the tiniest variables in every action, such as being able to pull pickups like a vacuum or slowing a pickup by firing continuously, saving a laser or bomb for when more enemies show up.
The best players conduct this demon kaleidoscope like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, but with shotguns.
Your skills are only half of it. After enough runs, you realize that manipulating each monster is the key to taking control of combat, and turning your enemies in steps on your path to divine prowess. Some can be thrown on their backs and used as launch pads to take to the skies, while others will spawn minions that can essentially be bred for ammunition.
The dizzying heights you reach with each power-up and each enemy vanquished are virtual and visually euphoric. The entire dark landscape of the world literally wraps around your view, and as your field of view folds in on itself, you can direct any creature in the crosshairs of your anger. A small misstep can still end you, but for a few fleeting seconds you are unstoppable.
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The graphics will seem appealing or unpleasant to you, but Hyper Demon isn’t as impenetrable as it appears in screenshots. When you’re in control, that storm of color and light is yours to handle. Once you’ve deciphered it all, you can take a closer look at replays (a feature baked in seamlessly so you can see every player on the best run of the leaderboard) and see the beauty in the chaos. Each dazzling visual effect or grizzly audio signal is specific, an explosion caused only by one kind of pickup or just the whimper of a certain enemy dying. Teach them and you can seize control from the abyss.
That’s the challenge at the core of the game: learning how to go from swinging helplessly in the dark to being a destroyer of worlds. The pursuit of ever-increasing power is the hook of so many action games, a fantasy so ingrained that it barely registers. It is expected. Hyper Demon makes it feel unexpected.
You don’t collect better weapons or trade guns for rocket launchers. You are just learning. The only thing that makes you better is knowledge. There are no tools that can be taken away because you are the Hyper Demon.
It’s this distinction from many other action games that keeps me in the void. The moment I die, I click and immediately put myself into the next run. I am unstoppable. Every little bit of progress shows me that there is still more to see, and knowing that there is more to learn and master is its own reward. That and kicking my friends off the leaderboards.
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