In 2016, a first-person shooter called Devil Daggers appeared on Steam. It could’ve been the subject of a middle schooler’s creepypasta: a game so demonic that most people only survive for a few seconds, and no one’s seen the end, if there even is one. After several hours of play, my Devil Daggers survival record is just 70 seconds. How do you take a concept like that to the next level?
Hyper Demon, a surprise Devil Daggers follow up that released on Steam today, has the answer: a game so demonic that it’s possible to survive for less than zero seconds.
Rather than counting the seconds until you die like Devil Daggers, Hyper Demon starts counting down from 10 seconds when the game starts. If the world didn’t dissolve away when I intentionally reach a low score of about negative 30 seconds, I could theoretically be infinitely bad at Hyper Demon.
To finish with a positive score in Hyper Demon, you have to kill the demons it spews at you as fast as you can. Death is easier to avoid in Hyper Demon than it is in Devil Daggers—I would’ve already beaten my Devil Daggers record if Hyper Demon counted seconds up instead of down—but so far it seems like it’s just as hard to record a high score. The world record right now is 368.
Like in Devil Daggers, you can watch a replay of any run on the leaderboard, and I have absolutely no clue what the player is doing in the record run: They’re air dashing through hellspace in incomprehensible ways, using weapons I don’t even know how to get. It looks like a Quake pro infiltrated Satan’s quantum computer.
I recognize some of what the best Hyper Demon player is seeing, including “holographic” red images which warn you about enemies approaching from behind, and the wildest feature, a dynamic field of view that can reach up to 180-degrees, which makes it look as if the world is being reflected on a silver orb in front of you. As you can imagine, it’s a lot to take in, although it hasn’t made me queasy. It doesn’t feel like I’m navigating a real 3D space so much as gliding through a 10-dimensional rainbow. I’m Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar, but I have a gun and no patience for five-dimensional aliens.
(To me, it looks more disorienting in videos and gifs than it actually feels to play, but if I’m wrong, I can’t think of a more valid use of the Steam refund system than physical discomfort.)
What’s more, at the end of the word record run, the player appears to… win? Unlike Devil Daggers, Hyper Demon promises an ending, if you can reach it. Or, perhaps, if it reaches you. Hyper Demon embraces its mystique: it’s “a pearl of lightning,” the Steam page says, “a dream from the future,” “a drop of poison,” and “a swan song.”
“The faster you slay demons, the harder the game and the higher your score,” developer Sorath says. “There is an end. Will it see you?”
I guess that’s for the Hyper Demon to decide.
