“Have you been to the Calgary Folk Fest before?” a voice breaking through the ether asks. Unnervingly, Britt Daniel can see me, but I can’t see him. The Spoon frontman’s publicist insisted upon a Zoom interview, so I’m momentarily thrown when I realize the next 24 minutes and 46 seconds will be spent interviewing someone embodied only by an ominous black box labelled ‘BRITT DANIEL,’ that faintly flashes every time his gravelly drawl breaks the silence like some sort of Texan HAL 9000. I guess that’s for the Hyper Demon to decide.I turn my camera on, but Britt Daniel does not. “The faster you slay demons, the harder the game and the higher your score,” developer Sorath says. Hyper Demon embraces its mystique: it’s “a pearl of lightning,” the Steam page says, “a dream from the future,” “a drop of poison,” and “a swan song.” What’s more, at the end of the word record run, the player appears to… win? Unlike Devil Daggers, Hyper Demon promises an ending, if you can reach it. (To me, it looks more disorienting in videos and gifs than it actually feels to play, but if I’m wrong, I can’t think of a more valid use of the Steam refund system than physical discomfort.) I’m Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar, but I have a gun and no patience for five-dimensional aliens. It doesn’t feel like I’m navigating a real 3D space so much as gliding through a 10-dimensional rainbow. As you can imagine, it’s a lot to take in, although it hasn’t made me queasy. I recognize some of what the best Hyper Demon player is seeing, including “holographic” red images which warn you about enemies approaching from behind, and the wildest feature, a dynamic field of view that can reach up to 180-degrees, which makes it look as if the world is being reflected on a silver orb in front of you. It looks like a Quake pro infiltrated Satan’s quantum computer. Like in Devil Daggers, you can watch a replay of any run on the leaderboard, and I have absolutely no clue what the player is doing in the record run: They’re air dashing through hellspace in incomprehensible ways, using weapons I don’t even know how to get. Death is easier to avoid in Hyper Demon than it is in Devil Daggers-I would’ve already beaten my Devil Daggers survival record if Hyper Demon counted seconds up instead of down-but so far it seems like it’s just as hard to record a high score. To finish with a positive score in Hyper Demon, you have to kill the demons it spews at you as fast as you can. If the world didn’t dissolve away when I intentionally reach a low score of about negative 30 seconds, I could theoretically be infinitely bad at Hyper Demon. Rather than counting the seconds until you die like Devil Daggers, Hyper Demon starts counting down from 10 seconds when the game starts. Hyper Demon, a surprise Devil Daggers follow up that released on Steam (opens in new tab) today, has the answer: a game so demonic that it’s possible to survive for less than zero seconds. How do you take a concept like that to the next level? After several hours of play, my Devil Daggers survival record is just 70 seconds. It could’ve been the subject of a middle schooler’s creepypasta: a game so demonic that most people only survive for a few seconds, and no one’s seen the end, if there even is one. In 2016, a first-person shooter called Devil Daggers (opens in new tab) appeared on Steam.
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