Hyper Demon is fast - a round can be, like, GIF-length fast when you're starting out: spawn, kill, die, all before the seconds hand of your watch has really moved (unless it's an automatic). But this gets at the heart of the whole experience, and it's probably the thing I haven't made clear yet. Oh yes, and the score counts down when you're not driving it up, so I end bad games with scores in the minus figures. The air dash? The Mario ground-pound? Maybe this is in Devil Daggers! But now there's a tutorial mode so you can't avoid it. Bunny-hopping and rocket-jumps - jumps powered by firing at the ground - are both lifts, I think, from Devil Daggers, but I can't remember a skill in which you can bounce your secondary weapon beam off the ground in order to lock-on to enemies on the rebound. So alongside the lacquered phosphene gloss that's been applied to the itchy enemy polygons of the original game, Hyper Demon tells you about a lot more stuff that you can do. The sound design's glorious, and as important as the visuals in cueing you into the action. It feels like the first step in the design - I am probably wrong - is watching how really good Devil Daggers played the game, and maybe, who knows, how the really witless players approached it, and seeing what opportunities there were there - what just needed a little nudge. What's different here? I'm tempted to say that Hyper Demon looks deeper at things that were implicit in Devil Daggers and makes them explicit. The dark arena from which medieval nightmares emerge, the deadly firepower located in your outstretched hand. Devil Daggers, another score-chasing micro-shooter that tore up Steam a few years back is from the same developer and has much the same DNA. There were warnings that such a game was coming. Watch on YouTube Here's a trailer for Hyper Demon. Forget Newton, Hyper Demon makes me realise what a shame it is that Hieronymus Bosch never did a season for Juicy Couture. Horned skulls, praying hands, glittering diamonds that shatter on impact. It wraps everything in a fish-eye lens, the queasiest of all lenses, just to give you that extra sense of being trapped deep within something, subdermal or far beneath the oceans. This implausibly fast score-chasing micro-shooter coats its enemies in the shimmering, strobing pinks and dirty golds that phosphenes like to trade in. But Hyper Demon certainly loves phosphenes. Would Isaac Newton have liked Hyper Demon? I will leave this to others to judge. But also the wonder of it: these scrolling, tunneling, chequerboard passageways that seem to open up between you and the world around you. Light from darkness: you can see why such an imbalance would have made Newton a bit grumpy. Newton was fixated with phosphenes, the frantic scattering light displays that erupt when you press your palms to your eyes and bother the optic nerve. Where exactly? (I feel you would want to be exact about this.) "Betwixt my eye and bone as neare to backside of my eye as I could." This is quite a thing to do to yourself, but Newton was fixated. Isaac Newton was once moved to put a bodkin, or large, blunt sewing needle, behind his eye. Compact and terrifying, this score-attack shooter feels like it's come from the future.
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