Lately, I've been playing a game called Devil Daggers, released by independent developer Sorath in 2016. I've been playing it a lot, which is interesting because it belongs simultaneously to several subsets of video games which I generally try to avoid:
- It's an endless game with no win condition. You play until you lose, and your score is the amount of time for which you managed to avoid losing. You can never really "finish" Devil Daggers; you can only decide that you're happy enough with your high score (or frustrated enough with the game itself) to stop playing. I like games that have definitive endings. I like to know when I'm done. Simply put, I like to beat games, but I'll never beat this one.
- The game is stupidly difficult. I'm almost 30 years old and I have a full-time job with a long commute and I'm getting married this year and I'll probably have children soon, and I don't have time to get good at stupidly difficult games. The only real measures of success in Devil Daggers are an achievement for surviving 500 seconds (which I'll never unlock) and placement in a global leaderboard (which will never have my name at the top). As of the last time I checked, only 49 people in the world were high enough on the leaderboard to have unlocked that singular achievement, and I very much doubt that I'll ever be among the top 50 players, no matter how much I practice.
- Despite being single-player, Devil Daggers is competitive (by way of that leaderboard), and I generally don't like competitive games for the same reason that I don't like stupidly difficult games.
- Devil Daggers is stressful. Each time I set a new personal record, my heart is pounding and my hands are shaking at the end. It's usually why my best runs come to an end. The game requires precise mouse control and shaking hands are a death sentence. This is not a relaxing experience. I wonder what it's doing to my blood pressure.
This isn't to say that I'm actually, factually, objectively bad at the game. Judging by the numbers, I think I've done rather well, reaching around 315 seconds on my best attempt which, at the time, nearly put me in the top 1,000 players. (To be more precise, I was ranked in the 1,040s, but a lot of players surpassed me while I was taking a break to play Dishonored and some other games, so presently I'm down in the 1,190s.) Then again, from where I stand, things look bleak. I've only gotten good enough to appreciate how much better the best players are, and how much better I would need to be in order to reach that 500-second goal. Devil Daggers is so incredibly hard that I still haven't survived long enough to fight every type of enemy, despite having gotten farther than the vast majority of players (who are numbered at over 100,000 according to the global leaderboard).
Maybe this makes me a sore loser, but I don't really like the idea of losing over and over again for eternity, with no end in sight (even if we consider 500 seconds to be a win state). Furthermore, I've never been a fan of having my scores, good or bad, permanently on display for the world to see. It seems that Devil Daggers is eating up an unusual amount of my time for a game that makes me feel like such a hopeless loser, especially considering I have an absurd number of games which I still haven't played and not enough time to play them. I really shouldn't be spending all my time on one frustrating game I'll never beat. So why am I doing it?
Because I'm addicted. Because, despite being exactly the kind of thing that drives me nuts, Devil Daggers is just a really good game.
It's also a simple game: There's one level. The same enemies always appear at the same times. You shoot them until you die and then you play again. There is no story. There are no characters. The faux-retro graphics are stylish as hell but are, of course, unlikely to impress anyone who doesn't have any nostalgia for that kind of thing. Setting aside the difficulty which extends the playtime via endless retries after infinite losses, there isn't much content. The best times, held by players whose skill level seems almost superhuman, are only around 1000 seconds. New content ends long before that time, when the "final boss" is defeated and enemy spawn patterns seem to enter a loop. It wouldn't be unfair to say that the length of the game itself, not counting countless replays, is only a few minutes.
None of this is meant as a criticism, though. Small games are okay if the price is right, and Devil Daggers is only $4.99, which seems appropriate. I got it from a $1.00 bundle, because I watch out for PC game deals like a hawk, but I wouldn't be disappointed if I had paid the full price.
Impatient players will conclude after a few attempts that Devil Daggers is merely a cheap novelty to be played for a few minutes and tossed aside, or that it's more of a tech demo for Sorath's brand of old-school pixel graphics than a carefully designed game. It's understandable that one might not see any value in the game after a few rounds of losing almost immediately. Until you get the hang of the basics, you'll die just because your reflexes weren't fast enough, or because your aim wasn't precise enough, or because you weren't looking in the right direction at some crucial moment. The surface-level gameplay (shoot things quickly and don't get hit) will appear to be all this game has to offer. However, Devil Daggers is deeper than it may appear at first glance. I wasn't lying when I called it a simple game — mechanically, it is simple — but even the simplest mechanics can introduce a layer of strategy.
Movement, spacial awareness, prioritization of targets, and understanding of enemy behavior are all very important, of course, as they are in any decent first-person shooter. Even weapon selection comes into play, as your primary dagger attack can take the form of a shotgun-like blast or a machine-gun-like stream, and limited homing daggers are acquired later on. What sets Devil Daggers apart are a few unusual gameplay mechanics, the most notable of which is somewhat counter-intuitive.
Although it might not be obvious at the start, you won't get far in the game without collecting the red gems dropped by tougher enemies. You'll acquire important power-ups at 10 gems, 70 gems, and (nominally) 220 gems. The catch is that those gems, which disappear after a few seconds, will move away from you whenever you shoot. They'll be attracted to you whenever you're not shooting, but, even then, they might not catch up with you in time, if you're moving away from them at full speed.
In a game with rapidly spawning enemies and infinite ammo, holding your fire and slowing down are exactly the opposites of what you'll want to do. It's easy to forget that the gems are even there, and the difficulty of picking them up increases sharply with the number of enemies on the battlefield; you won't have time for a break when you've got an entire army of demons breathing down your neck. In this way, the gem mechanic serves to punish the player for being unable to keep the battlefield under control. Giant spiders which steal your gems, and towering squid-like spawn points which periodically spit out enemies until destroyed, will have the same effect. When things start to go wrong, it can all fall apart very quickly.
The first step to becoming proficient at the game is recognizing that sound is extremely important. Each enemy makes a unique sound; you can usually hear them as they spawn, even before you can see them, and you'll even have some warning if one of them is approaching from behind. It's easy for some of the more subtle sound effects to be lost in the chaos, but you'll learn to focus on the ones that really matter.
More experienced players will learn to move faster by repeatedly jumping, to maximize shotgun firing rate with the perfect rhythm of click-hold-release, to collect more gems by deliberately leaving some enemy spawn points intact, and to gain more height by shotgun-blasting the ground while jumping (although the practical usefulness of this last maneuver is questionable). Ultimately, however, it seems the key to being the best is to memorize the game (after, of course, mastering aim and movement). You need to know exactly which enemies are in the upcoming wave and exactly how to defeat them most efficiently. The fact that each round is the same, in terms of when each enemy spawns, is arguably the game's greatest flaw. However, if the game were more unpredictable, it would also be a lot more difficult. The best scores would likely be a fraction of what they are.
On the subject of flaws, there are a few "gotchas" in the game's design, namely that homing daggers are acquired at 70 gems but using them will detract from progress toward the next upgrade. Inexperienced players might be unaware of this, because the number of gems acquired and the number of homing daggers remaining are both invisible to the player. But I guess the idea is that, once you're good enough, you won't need those homing daggers and, knowing they're limited, won't use them. Getting the last dagger upgrade would then come naturally, but perhaps not for more trigger-happy players. The fact that you can't see how many gems you have until you're dead is certainly an annoying feature, in any case.
If I could add one feature to the game — leaving all of the existing content intact, of course — I would add some kind of campaign mode. Maybe it's because the game is so reminiscent of Doom, Quake, and other old-school shooters, but it just seems to be begging for one. Besides, one flat arena is too bland an environment for a game with such a wonderful art style.
Okay, so maybe I just want the chance to say I beat Devil Daggers. That would be nice, too. But I also want more from Sorath, even if it's another game I'll never win. In the meantime, Devil Daggers is the perfect game to play when I have only a few minutes of downtime.
