Survival Horror

A review of Devil Daggers

Devil Daggers is raw uncut video game that's been cooked down into a crystal form that you can liquefy and inject into your eyeballs. This is a game that is in love with the grimy reality of video games as much as it is in lust with visceral emotions that even the crudest video games can evoke. Other games have great stories, astonishing visuals and wholly unique mechanics, but none of them can touch the concentrated endorphin run playing Devil Daggers for two consecutive minutes can provide.

A quarter-century ago, a group of developers in Texas created a game called DOOM that birthed an entire genre of games where the player looks down the barrel of a gun and blasts endless hordes of enemies. DOOM, and the hundreds of games it inspired, exist in a world where the player can, with enough time and energy 'win'. Devil Daggers is not like that. Devil Daggers makes the promise of DOOM's title a reality. If you play Devil Daggers, your character will inevitably die. The only question is how long it will take you to succumb.

The 'point' of Devil Daggers, a game in which you literally shoot daggers out of your outstretched palm at an endless menagerie of encroaching demons, is to bask in a collection of frictions so delectable that they would be marked $$$$ if this game was a restaurant on Yelp. The more demons you kill, the longer you'll get to luxuriate in the game's frictive bliss. Every piece of this game is tuned up and honed, the sound effects are punishingly precise, the visuals are horrifyingly murky, and there is never any doubt whether one of your daggers hit its intended target. Devil Daggers does not lie to you, it merely reveals the truth. And the truth, every time, is that you have been found wanting.

I am terrible at this game. Some people online are [phenomenal](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Drp0uFx5-8o) at it. I think we probably enjoy it equally. The moment at the start of a round before the daggers start flying are just as thrilling as the moment immediately before your player character comes into contact with an enemy and the round ends. The only difference between these two points is your heart rate. Nintendo would never make a game quite like Devil Daggers, but this game is steeped in the things that make Nintendo games so good. It is not a time-waster, it's a time-saver. It rescues you from mundanity. When you pick it up, it envelops you completely, you're never doing busy work, you are always sharpening your blade against the finest whetstone in the world. Playing Devil Daggers at all means you are improving at Devil Daggers, and the only way to truly get better is to engage with it fully.

I have trouble engaging with video games these days because I often feel like I leave the experience with nothing to show for it. There's too much padding, too much repetition, too much fiddling against mechanics that aim to simulate realism and inevitably fall short. You don't leave playing Devil Daggers with anything tangible except the guarantee that you're incrementally better at Devil Daggers. Maybe that is enough.