![]() Then, when the enemies kick in, the only noise is a soft humming. There’s no music at all, giving the small arena a sense of unease and foreboding even before you pick up the eponymous Devil Dagger and start shooting demons. The thing that I hadn’t read anywhere is that this doubles as a damn effective horror game. To this day, I’ve only been able to survive for about one and a half minutes, and when you’re as heavily surrounded by enemies as you are in this game, those minutes feel like an eternity. I had read before playing this that this game was challenging, and it certainly is. There’s no story to take in, no new levels, just pure twitch-based gameplay. It’s just you, some weapons, an arena, and a whole bunch of demonic entities that want to skin your character alive. The gameplay of Devil Daggers is basically every old school FPS distilled down into its absolute simplest, bare-bones ideas. The catch is that you die in one hit from anything. As soon as you pick up the dagger, monsters of all kinds start spawning in the arena, and your goal is to survive for as long as possible against increasingly difficult waves of enemies. ![]() Initially, you can fire it in a constant stream of daggers, or in a single powerful shotgun blast that’s good for close range (good performance can lead to upgrades of these). In the middle is a single dagger which, when picked up, gives you the ability to fire projectiles from your fingers. In this game, you are an unknown person trapped on a suspended platform in the middle of an infinite dark void. The premise for the 2016 first person shooter Devil Daggers could hardly be simpler if it tried. Devil Daggers The premise is deceptively simple and oh-so terrifying. Each game presents a unique vision of what hell is, and have more in common than they initially seem. These two games are the harder-than-a-day-old-ciabatta roll Devil Daggers and the meme-ready Spooky’s Jumpscare Mansion. Today, though, I’m going to focus on a specific idea of hell by way of two indie games that on the surface couldn’t be more different. No one knows for sure what happens when we die, which is scary in and of itself, but the idea that living a bad life can lead to something even worse is existentially terrifying. ![]() The specifics are always different, but the idea of a place of eternal damnation and punishment for a lifetime of sin is an idea that humans have latched on to, and for good reason. Hell is an idea carried by most cultures around the world.
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