Released final month on Kongregate’s new retailer Kartridge, Hell Is Other Demons makes the hop to Steam right this moment. It’s a neat-looking platform shooter by Cuddle Monster Games, and a quick, twtichy (though not particularly hardcore) arcade game about bouncing round arenas in hell, blatting waves of demons and spending your gathered hell-dollars on upgrades to do it yet again. Straightforward high-score-hunting stuff, though there’s a marketing campaign mode with bosses, plus a somewhat neat two-colour aesthetic and that trendy arcade standby; a pulsing synthwave soundtrack.
Hell Is Other Demons appears most impressed by the wonderful GoNNER and Downwell, particularly the latter when you’ve picked up some powerups. Some character upgrades may give you spiked boots for higher bouncing on enemy heads, and there’s even one improve that fires lasers downwards on each double-jump. Enemies come from all instructions, however controls are restricted to easy left/proper motion, leaping, capturing and a smart-bomb like Ultimate potential. An easy arcade shooter, then, however with a neat look, a very good soundtrack and a few beefy-feeling weapons.
While there’s an arcade mode the place you decide a pre-assembled character, then acquire power-ups and attempt to maintain out so long as doable, the meat of the game seems to be in its marketing campaign. While most of its levels are single-screen (with some vertical scrolling) arenas, enemy waves are scripted and cash collected permits you to purchase upgrades at outlets between ranges. Each world has its personal color pallette, set of enemies and is capped off by a giant ugly boss monster, and so they’re a neat-looking bunch. Lots of gigantic skull-faced beasties lurking within the background. Not going to vary the world, but it surely appears like easy, twitchy dumb enjoyable.
Hell Is Other Demons is out now on Steam and Kartridge for £7.19/€8.19/$9.99. It’s printed by Kongregate.
