Devil Daggers

I saw Devil Daggers on Steam when it first came out and thought, “What an odd-sounding game.” I saw the “Too long, didn’t play” guy on Gamers With Jobs call it “punishingly hard,” and use it as the benchmark for measuring hard games ever since. I put it on my wish list. I laugh at hard games! Ha!

Recently it went on sale and I bought it for $2.99, along with some other stuff I might play some day (including another one of the Batman games-I have them all now but haven’t played any of them yet).

Welp, Devil Daggers is pretty hard all right, but it’s also fun. Basically you run around a big round platform and shoot weird floating skulls and other demonic monstrosities until you die. Supposedly you’re throwing daggers really fast but it looks more like you’re shooting a stream of alien goo. That’s pretty much the entire game.

Average game time is somewhere around 10 seconds when you first start out. After an hour you might get that average up to about 30 seconds. After about a week I’ve advanced to the point where I can survive 60-70 seconds per game. That’s how you “score” a game, by the way: How long it takes you to die, to four decimal places. My absolute best time so far is 108 seconds.

I love this game. It’s really fast and smooth and responsive. It’s almost hypnotic. After you die, you can hit ‘R’ and immediately start a new game. Like instantaneously. How awesome is that? How many games today let you restart instantaneously? Almost none, that’s how many.

The other awesome thing is that it takes about 5 seconds for the game to startup after you click the desktop icon. You think to yourself, “Man I’d love to veg out with a dumb game for a few minutes,” click the game icon, and you’re right there. What a concept. It’s like the PC equivalent of an Android game, except even faster!

The sound effects are really understated but effective. You can tell they put a lot of work into it. There’s no music, just weird ambient creepy sounds.

The only flaw in the game is their insistence on artistic integrity by using a pixelated low-resolution software-rendered Quake look. You don’t even get to pick your screen resolution. It always looks like a 512×384 resolution game in 1997. I would much prefer it render everything with smooth edges at 2560×1440. But it’s a small quibble.