Do you know what’s great? Metrodivanias. I love them! The exploration, combat, and progression through massively complex worlds are always great fun. Such as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night! One of the most genres defining games ever made, which has influenced so many developers and others with its great gameplay and amazing world design. So when I saw Demoniaca: Everlasting Night, a dark fantasy-inspired adventure game with plenty of gore and nudity (most important), I had to check it out.
What is Demoniaca: Everlasting Night?
Demoniaca: Everlasting Night is a dark fantasy Metroidvania, that centers on a young woman seeking revenge. One fateful night, her village is attacked by a gathering of demons, slaughtering everyone and leaving her dead. While lying on the ground with her stomach open, she absorbs a few drops of demon’s blood, which makes her stronger and be able to sew her wounds together. With enough strength, she ventures forth to the corrupt Tower of Babel, to exact her revenge and kill those who have wronged her.
Taking place in the might Tower of Babel, our nameless hero faces hordes of monsters, powerful demons, and a death trap-filled labyrinth where pain, suffering, and horror lurks around every corner. However, she has incredible powers to deal with any foes in her path. Having great strength, impressive fighting skills, and abilities that allow her to deal unspeakable damage, heal herself or summon help in a tricky battle, our hero is ready for battle.
Gameplay
Demoniaca follows the main principles of the genre to heart, giving us an expansive and complex world to explore, filled with mystery, danger, and epic boss battles while adding in some new things of its own.
Players will venture through the Tower of Babel looking for those responsible for the attack on her village. To progress to the top of the tower, they must gather key items and abilities that will allow them to bypass certain obstacles, fight powerful bosses, and generally become more powerful to take on the ultimate evil. Such as being able to smash in floors to reveal new areas or teleport past heavily guarded doors. Demoniaca has plenty of the tropes of the genre and puts most of them to good use.
The combat strives away from your typical adventure game and instead focuses on brutal melee combat that includes epic combos and special moves. It’s an odd inclusion, but one that’s fun. There’s a varied roster of enemies to fight along the way, many classic enemy types such as ghouls, the undead, and some rather strange foes in the form of video game cartridges. They can fly, poison, and cause you massive harm, even turning the visuals into an 8-bit Gameboy game (those pesky cartridge enemies).
Exploration is vital to your mission and progression overall. Finding hidden rooms behind fake walls, backtracking with new abilities, and fighting optional bosses can provide you with special rewards and souls. It’s incredibly important to search and fight as much as possible, to buy useful resources, and learn new fighting moves and skills. Becoming stronger and learning new better fighting combos is a must in the never-ending and expansive labyrinth of death. There's a progression system where you can level up after gaining a certain amount of XP, allowing players to up their Health, Strenght, Intelligence, and Luck.
Plus, there's a huge array of equipable items, such as rings and armour, boosting certain stats and offering better protection against certain enemies and attacks. There is an impressive amount of detail when it comes to stats, and implementing certain items will have a positive and negative effect in most instances. Making your loadout a battle of risk and reward.
What you get is a traditional Metroidvania formula, with an interesting, brutal, and fun combat system, plenty of exploration, varied enemy types, and big bosses.
What I liked about Demoniac
Visually speaking, Demoniaca is a nice game to look at. While its visuals are not always consistent, as character models in-game and in cutscenes look very different. Along with the backgrounds being a contrast to the more pixel art character designs, it is visually pleasing overall. But I have to say the main thing that excels in the aesthetics department is the soundtrack. Demoniaca’s music is incredibly awesome! The mix of metal and gothic melodies is great, providing a fantastic and motivating push for when you’re duking it out with the hordes of Hell.
The combat is solid and extremely fun throughout. Our nameless hero has plenty of combos to learn and master, along with special moves which can help her out in a tight spot. When fighting the varied line-up of enemies, there are plenty of ways to dish out the pain. From basic kick and punch combos to combination attacks, super-heavy attacks, and magical-based attacks that deal massive damage. It’s highly rewarding when you pull off a massive combo and best of all, the move set is quite easy to learn. There aren’t any overly complicated moves here and the game does its best to encourage you to experiment and expand your fighting knowledge when possible.
I really appreciated the leveling up system, making your efforts feel rewarded and the flexibility of upscaling certain perks and attributes that will benefit you personally was also handled exceptionally well. The array of items is impressive, while most items felt useful in some way. There is an option to dismantle items you don't need or have duplicates of. Compared to Spythony of the Night, Demoniaca has an easy-to-understand inventory, which is quick to access and even quicker to allot the items you need and equip.
There is also a two-player mode here as well, which is handy as the game can be incredibly hard at times, especially on the “Classic” mode.
Demoniaca’s story is also not too bad. I like the fact the developers have gone a darker, mature tale compared to other games in the genre. It mixes up body horror, cosmic horror and while there is nudity, it never felt overly sexualised or weird, in my opinion.
What Demoniaca could’ve done betterThe biggest issue with my experience was the controls, as they’re just clunky and miss the certain quality of life actions you need in a game like this. And worst is that you can’t remap them. I understand why the controls are how they are, but not allowing remapping is a cardinal sin in gaming.
Jump is done by the left trigger, and this isn’t a massive issue until you realise that traversing the world requires 80% jumping. So, your trigger finger will ache after a while. This also meant the flow and world design itself was awkward, consisting of numerous jumps, repeatedly and consisting of tediously long corridors both vertical and horizontal. And without a way to grab and pull yourself up from a ledge … it’s a nightmare getting around most of the tower.
The world’s design does not fare better and wasn’t much fun to explore. How it’s set up, makes backtracking and general exploration long-winded and tiresome. Each key area is separated by a portal leading to the next area with the world flowing in a somewhat linear manner. The main problem is the limited access and lack of multiple paths.
If you look at the image above of the world map, you'll see multiple areas are next to each other but can be accessed unless you enter a certain portal. So the entrance hall can only be accessed by the underground and the underground can only be accessed by the junction. Now if I wanted to go back to the entrance hall but I'm in the east tower, I have to follow the path through several areas back. Even though the West Tower is right above the underground/entrance hall, I can't access them, which is just poor level planning.
There's just often a lot of tedious backtracking through multiple areas.
In a game like Hollow Knight or Castlevania SOTN, most, if not all areas can be reached through multiple access points. For example, in Castlevania SOTN, if you need to get to the Chapple, you can reach it via the Laboratory, the top of the castle, or the Colosseum. Even the entrance hall in that game can be accessed by two other areas.
Yes, some areas have one access point, but you also had portals that allowed you to jump from one side of the map to the other. If Demoniaca had multiple portals in one area to access others, then this would have saved time and tedious backtracking repeatedly.
Lastly, there were plenty of enemy balancing issues and generally just some tedious boss battles.
Overall?Demoniaca: Everlasting Night is a decent stab at the Metroidvania genre and does implement some neat ideas to spice things up. The dark story, intense and engaging combat system, and cool ideas for side bosses for extra bonuses are great. But the world design, relentless use of jumping, bad controls, and balancing issues make Demonica far from great. If you can get past the monotonous world design and bad controls, then you might really enjoy this. While it’s nothing compared to the legends of the genre, it's worth checking out for its dark gothic tones, enthralling combat, and an awesome soundtrack.
++ Visuall nice with a great soundtrack
+ Awesome brawler combat system
+ Leveling system is nice and flexible and easy use of inventory
-- Controls and really clunky and no option to remap
- Very limited pathways around the world and very tedious to traverse at times
- Lots of enemies and bosses which are lacklustre
An Xbox One review key for Demoniaca: Everlasting Night was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.
