Developer: AKI

Publisher: EastAsiaSoft

Genre: Metroidvania/Brawler

Reviewed On: PlayStation 5

Also Available For: PC, Switch, Xbox

CONTENT WARNING: THIS ARTICLE FEATURES DETAILING OF DISTURBING CONTENT WITHIN THE GAME BEING REVIEWED, INCLUDING GORE AND SEXUALIZED VIOLENCE. READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.

I try not to be cruel in my reviews, and most of the time it’s easy. Even when I don’t love or even particularly like a game there’s generally something nice to say about it, and I’m also able to remind myself that the people who made it put a lot of time and effort into their work. There’s a difference between being critical of a work and setting out to demoralize or hurt the maker of said work, and I don’t like the idea of falling on the latter side of that line; I wouldn’t want to drive a fellow creative type away from their passion just because I was unimpressed with one thing they made. Occasionally, however, I come across a game that is so tremendously terrible and tasteless that I just don’t care anymore.

So it is with Demoniaca: Everlasting Night.

The Basics: Demoniaca: Everlasting Night is an action RPG inspired by Castlevania that bills itself as being “dark, gothic, mature and sexy” and taking place in a “dark world of grotesque maturity.” I’ll unpack that in a bit, but first I’d like to go over some of the things it does wrong mechanically just to be thorough.

For starters, the combat is absolutely atrocious. Enemies are damage sponges capable of absolutely destroying the player character with just a few hits and avoiding getting hit is an impossible task for reasons which have nothing to do with a high skill ceiling. Despite the game ostensibly being a metroidvania, combat is based more around fighting games, with heavy reliance on combos and special moves executed by way of quarter circles and whatnot. I will grant that this is actually a fantastic idea in theory, but with Demoniaca the execution falls horrendously short. The range of the player’s attacks are ”so close to the enemy your hitboxes might as well be touching” which is a major problem when a) half of the enemies can hit you from much further away than that b) the other half inflict some sort of status affliction, such as being turned to stone, if you so much as collide with them, and c) enemies seemingly cannot be stunned by executing skillful combos. Combine their steadiness and sturdiness with the fact that enemy attacks have next to no telegraphing, patterning, or even delay in how often they can attack and you have a recipe for fights that are mostly just trading blows and hoping you’ll be able to tank it while whittling the monster’s health down. Moreover, most of the special moves at the player’s disposal require an energy resource to be executed, meaning that if you aren’t already good at the sort of special move systems fighting games use there’s no reasonable way to practice and you’re just plain out of luck.

Aside from the combat being a mess, the game’s structure is… well, also a mess. Platforming is imprecise at best and frustrating at worse, there is for some reason a relatively common pickup dropped by enemies and breakable objects that will actually lower your health, and environmental hazards such as noxious gas can knock you down as if you had taken a hefty hit from an enemy instead of only doing damage. The game includes a leveling system and four stats which can make the player’s life marginally easier, but rather than actually explaining anywhere that stat allocation must be done manually upon level up the devs trusted that players would just notice despite giving precious little visual cues indicating as much. The story elements, in addition to being poorly translated, border on the nonsensical, feeling as though they were written by people whose understanding of narrative structure and convention is based exclusively on pop culture anime and games, mashing a bunch of vaguely mysterious dialogue and bizarro characters together and thinking that makes for intrigue.

At this point you may be thinking, dear reader, “well yeah that sounds pretty rough but I don’t know that it warrants the vitriol with which you’ve been laying it all out, Lee,” to which I respond: I’ve saved the worst for last. As I said earlier, Demoniaca bills itself as “dark, gothic, mature and sexy”, which in this case means displaying some rather disturbing imagery that does not paint a flattering picture of the developers’ moral character. Before I started writing this review, I decided to give the game a little more time, as I had only played an hour and a half (which felt like easily twice that much) and wanted to be certain I wasn’t being overly harsh. It wasn’t long before I encountered a new type of enemy which was a skeleton wearing the severed, nude torso of a woman (with presumably the same woman’s head on a pike it uses as a weapon) for a chestplate, the sprite for which bounces up and down during its idle animation and has visible, pixelly nipples.

What really gets to me about that is that, on their own, the two elements of that creature design wouldn’t be so bad. Earlier in Demoniaca I encountered a topless snake woman or something, also featuring bouncing pixel breasts and nipples, to which my response was to simply roll my eyes and move on. Juvenile and crass, to be sure, but ultimately not so bad. If the creature had simply been a skeleton wearing a non-sexualized human torso, I would’ve gone “oh, gross!” but killed it and moved on. The fact that what the developers actually created combines the sexual and the grotesque suggests to me that the gore and violence towards women is meant to be just as much a part of the titillation here as the actual tits, and if I may be allowed a moment of extreme unprofessionalism:

Fuck. That.

So there you have it, folks! For making me have to see that with my own two eyes, the developers of Demoniaca: Everlasting Night lost any and all goodwill I try to afford to game developers as a general rule. This game is as repulsive as it is poorly made, and I cannot stress enough that you should stay well away from it.