review of Devil Daggers (2016), the arcade survival shooter by sorath

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its kind of secretly one of the best games ever made

ok, i need to qualify that statement a bit

devil daggers does not contain many elements one might be thinking of when one considers 'the best game ever made'. there is no narrative, characters, exploration, or really much of a world at all. the entire game takes place on a flat circle of stone tiles floating in a pitch black void. the gameplay is motivated entirely by an arcade style score attack, in which your score increments at a constant rate of 1 point per second. the entire point of the game is simply to survive longer on this stone platform

i have 272 hours on this game. at time of writing, it is my 5th most played game on steam

if you are a particular sort of person, who enjoys challenge & improvement, devil daggers is among the most rewarding & satisfying games to get better at. it is extremely elegantly designed, with just a handful of distinct mechanics that all interlock with each other & you to create a beautifully chaotic yet controllable system. there is an endless well of subtleties, resulting in split second decision making on level that you'd think would only exist in competitive multiplayer games where you're trying to outsmart whole human opponents. but it's not a human opponent it's approximately 500 skulls

so here's how the game works. you start a run, & as the seconds tick up, enemies spawn at set time intervals. the spawn timings are constant, which gives the game its progression & gives each segment a distinct challenge. the spawn positions are random, which is what makes each run its own unique puzzle you have to react to & solve in real time

the first enemy that spawns is a tentacled bone spire thing that spews forth a whole swarm of skulls. these skulls (& indeed, every enemy in the whole game) will kill you instantly on contact, so you must shoot them with your titular Devil Daggers. these are projectiles with a travel time, so you have to aim in such a way that you're leading the trajectories of as many individual skulls as possible to catch them on their paths. the initially erratic & chaotic seeming skulls also have their own sort of flocking momentum logic to them. if you move in just the right way, you can corral all the disparate skull swarms into a predictable orbiting skullcloud. the tentacle spires themselves can only be killed by shooting a gem weak point, which rotates around it at a slow constant rate, forcing you to either move around to get it, or wait for it to turn towards you. at the later sections of the game, it becomes crucial to keep track of multiple rotations at once so you can know exactly which targets you can shoot from which positions at which time. this is just the first enemy

then you get to the upgraded squids, which have 2 gem weakpoints on opposite sides you need to shoot both of at different times. but then also there's a spider that doesnt attack you on its own but steals your gem collectibles so you have to(*) focus on it first! & then the multisegmented burrowing centipede! & so on. all of these enemies have similar amounts of subtleties of their own. i won't go through everything this game will throw at you, partially to avoid 'spoilers' (personally my first 10 hours of playtime, in which i got a score of 303, were all done completely blind without any assistance, which i felt made it more fun), & also because there's only so much i can do to get the gist across through text, rather than just experiencing it yourself

& then...

once you get very deep into the game, deeper than most people manage to go, the game runs out of its handcrafted gauntlet of challenges, & starts spawning the same set of enemies in an increasingly fast loop. this seems like it would be the end, but i would argue it's where the game's design really starts shining. you're dealing with nearly every enemy all at once. the slight differences in timing each wave subtly changes your targeting priority. there's a rhythm of ebb & flow to everything you do. you're positioning yourself to aim at one kind of enemies while simultaneously kiting several other kinds of enemies to both not kill you & also easily let you kill them later. & you still need to collect all the gems! there's now a resource management aspect, so making it far doesn't just mean surviving the later parts, it requires playing all of the earlier parts of loop more efficiently too. the objectively very difficult achievement of getting to 500 seconds starts feeling like just a tutorial section up against mastering the loop. there's always more. you can do fucking anything. you have absolutely no idea what you're doing

...

as intimidating as everything i've said may seem, its also just. a plainly fun game to play. there's first rate sound design, with the skulls making a visceral clacking sound on being shot. enemies instantly flash bright red & satisfyingly crumple away when killed. it's one of those 'tetris effect' type games, that makes you constantly run through scenarios in your head even when you're not playing. between its moments of genuine stress & frustration, it can be very addicting. the game is genuinely not for everyone because of its difficulty & intensity, but if you're the right type of person, it's really really good

anyways buy the game ok
https://store.steampowered.com/app/422970/Devil_Daggers/

it's normally $10 but it goes on sale pretty frequently for $2.50. the 10th anniversary is coming up soon in about a month so they'll probably do a sale or something for that