This week your intrepid heroes attempt to change output devices, pray for hitback, and moon-walk dash? Demon Peak faces the CHAIRQUISITION!
Game: Demon Peak
Webzone: Demon_Peak
Devel: Kajak Games
Engine: Custom engine using MonoGame framework.
Price: $4.99
Wazzat: In Demon Peak, you play as the nameless warrior, trapped inside the depths of an unholy Mountain. Explore the mysterious and perilous enviroments, fight against a multitude of different enemies and gather magical abilities to overcome the Mountain’s evil inhabitants.
Mandatory Disclosure: They sent us review copies.
CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope
– Not sure if want
– Check it out
– Shutupandtakemymonies
Makes with the working
V-
- Like Strider will point out it locks onto your default sound sync and refuses to let go.
- This is a legit problem since most people have speakers and a headset.
- If I have to quit a game, change my default sync, then restart… you done goofed.
- That could be one of the reasons you don’t see many streams of Demon Peak.
J-
M-
- The sound device can’t be changed while in game of by setting the default device in pavucontrol, I have the exact same problem with SpeedRunners.
- That’s a minimal issue and everything else works perfectly.
- The engine is Mono based, maybe FNA but doesn’t look like a Unity layout.
- You even get a bonus Windows and Mac executables in the same folder!
Total-
Shiny / Sounds
V-
- It’s semi well done hipster-pixel 2D art.
- The main character looks out of place / or from another game.
- Everything is brown mixed with varying shades of dark.
- Sound effects are meh and the background noise is on a short loop causing the headset to get noped.
J-
- At this point, you need to be pulling a hyper light drifter or owlboy and have a rad ass soundtrack in order to get me to give more than two chairs for a hipster pixel game
- Everything is acceptably done, I have no real issues with either the soundtrack nor the graphics.
- They’re just kinda meh to me.
M-
- The art style is really close to what an actual 16 bit console would be capable of
- I’d even go further and say it has a Genesis vibe to it
- As anyone would expect, not a huge amount of options for a 2D platformer but you can go crazy with the scanline settings
- The music is excellent, totally fitting for a Metroidvania game, each track has a different style and while some have a Castlevania feel, others are closer to what you’d hear in Super Metroid.
- If that wasn’t good enough, the save points are giant cats, in rooms with normal sized cats!
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Control
V-
- Hollow Knight has proven that you can have tight responsive controls.
- This has neither.
- OOTB it binded movement to the analog stick because reasons.
- However, everything is rebindable so it don’t get 1 Chair.
J-
- I get that they want you to be able to moon-walk dash, but I’m not a fan of how they implemented it
- If you want context dash, you gotta enable it in ze menu
- General movement and attacking is fine, but some of the finer jumps expose the lack of the control tightness
M-
- Controls exactly like you would expect from a 16 bit era platformer.
- You can even play with a Super Nintendo pad, I recommend it, it’s even better than the x360 controller!
- Everything is rebindable but the default settings are good.
- Uses SDL2 so the mappings are still correct when switching between controllers
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FUN
V-
- The furry savepoints really fail to jive with the rest of the game.
- No hate, just saying.
- Dark Souls comparison incoming!
- Why? Because Demon Peak is Dark Souls hard.
- Developers, developers, developers, Dark Souls was /is a great series despite it being unforgivingly FU hard, not because of it.
- You can’t slap a YOLO difficulty mode on your game and expect it to garner the same amount of respect and attention.
- This map sucks donkey arse and I have no idea where the hell i’m at.
- Speedrun setting.
- Seriously, if I see that setting you just told me that your game was designed from the ground up to allow me to bullsh*t my way past enemies.
- If you build a game with speedrunning in mind you’ve missed the goddamn point, son.
- That shite is only remotely interesting because people have found ways to hack around games that were never designed to be beaten in that time.
- Speaking of enemies.
- My kingdom for some hitback!
J-
- Gotta echo the knockback sentiment
- Attack, then run away, attack then run away is kinda boring. And considering that’s most of the fights I’ve run into, colour me bored
- It’s either that, or do the super cheesy jump to avoid all the enemies outright, which I can’t do reliably, so it’s back to hit and run away
- Metroidvania games are a bit of a mixed bag to me. Stuff like Owlboy and hollow knight, I really enjoy. Stuff like this, not so much
- Once you get the double jump, the game opens up a bit more, but it still devolves into the same thing
- The exploration part of the formula is kinda meh as well. Levels do loop back in on themselves, but navigation is a bit of a pain
- Also,I gotta admit, as a cat owner, when I see a cats face poking out of a hole, I stay aware from it. Cuz you’re gonna get bit. In this, they’re the save points. Pretty weird brad.
M-
- If there’s one game genre I’m particularly a fan of it’s Metroidvanias. Dust, Owlboy and AM2R are among some of my favorite games on Linux (and Super Metroid is one of my favorite games of all times).
- This game delivers just what I like.
- But let’s go back to that Dark Souls comparison for a minute. I noticed in the past years that comparing a game to Dark Souls is the lazy way of putting a label on any game where you died more than 3 times in the same spot.
- It’s not a LGC thing, even big Youtubers like Jim Sterling or TotalBiscuit will do it. But it’s funnier when people who haven’t even played Dark Souls do it.
- That said, the game is not even that hard and if you want to compare it to a modern 3D game, Darksiders (also one of my favorite games) would probably be more fitting, mostly because of the game’s environment.
- The game is hard though, but with patience and training you will get out of any situation. The bosses are another story, they’ll kill you in a couple of hits if you’re not careful (1 hit for the Hierophant’s strongest attack!).
- The map system might feel clunky at first, with rooms much bigger than what you would have in a Metroid game but it forces you to remember levels and they are small enough that you wouldn’t get lost for too long.
- There is indeed a speed run clock you can activate in the options, which is not that surprising since games of this style are usually popular among speedrunners. This makes me want to go back to the game after I’ve beaten it.
- It’s not a super long game but I’m almost at 5 hours of playtime and still haven’t beaten it. I’m not very good and I tend to die a lot and get lost a lot so a normal playthrough (if you’re better than me) should be around 3 hours.
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Final –
