Shadows Of The Damned
A bizarre, yet fun game from hell.
By Spaceman-Spiff on: July 26, 2011s
The following was submitted by Jared Chadwick of the Gamechurch Faction.
Shadows of the Damned is best described as the video game equivalent of a road movie. On Garcia Hotspur’s quest through hell to rescue his girlfriend from the clutches of Flemming, ruler of the underworld, you’ll do a lot of house cleaning from beginning to end. If you’re looking for the gaming equivalent of Army of Darkness, Shadows of the Damned manages to maintain a subtle balance of horror, comedy, and great gameplay thanks to Suda 51’s vision and Shinji Mikami’s combat. That isn’t to say the game is without its faults, but for every step it stumbles backwards it manages to take two forward.
The story is about as straight forward as it sounds. You fill the demon-slaying boots of Garcia Hotspur and his demonic companion Johnson, a flaming skull who conveniently transforms into a variety of weapons that you can upgrade throughout the game. After making a name for himself as a demon hunter, Garcia catches the attention of Flemming, the Lord of the Dead, who then kidnaps Garcia’s girlfriend as retaliation and takes her back to hell to kill her for the rest of eternity. Garcia promptly follows of course, and it’s your job to cut a swath through Flemming’s favored demons to get to him and take Paula back. There really isn’t much more to it than that, and it’s a shame Grasshopper didn’t take an opportunity to flesh out more backstory during Garcia and Johnson’s banter instead of setting the record for most jokes about genitalia in a videogame. But despite all the groan-inducing jokes you’ll endure, the game can be genuinely funny when it wants to be. More than that, it’s impressive to see just how well the game balances the scary with the funny. Running through a dark, grotesque catacomb while a demonic version of your girlfriend franticly chases you and Garcia tells Johnson how it reminds him of the time he jokingly told Paula he was married is a good example of what you can expect to find here.
But what good is all that if the game is no fun to play? Luckily Suda 51 has covered his typical weak point of gameplay with Shinji Mikami’s knack for all things technical. If you’ve played Resident Evil 4, Shadows of the Damned will feel familiar to you right away. The third person shooting keeps the tension of constantly watching your back for the unknown without using frustrating tank controls to build tension by removing control from the player. The shooting mechanics have a visceral level of satisfaction as enemies recoil from your bullets and limbs and gore fly into the air, all determined by location specific damage. As waves of demons run, jump, and crawl towards you, you can stun them with a lightshot from your weapon in order to buy you time. This also comes into play in a lot of the game’s puzzles. As darkness encroaches around you have to find and shoot mounted goat heads with the lightshot in order to dispel it, otherwise you will take damage over time and enemies become invulnerable to bullets while covered in darkness. The puzzles never get too complex, and ridding rooms of darkness never overstays its welcome to the extent you would expect, especially considering its one of the few puzzle mechanics in the game besides -what else- finding “keys” for doors in the form of feeding eyes, brains, or strawberries to baby heads mounted on locked doors in order to make them open. Did I mention how bizarre this game is?
As much as I like SotD simply for the fresh take it tries to bring to the Survival/Horror genre, a lot stands between it and greatness. While the environments themselves change themes throughout the game, the color palette stays almost completely the same. After 4 hours steeped in the same dark reds and blacks it starts to wear on you. The voice acting is great, and it carries a lot of the intentionally bad jokes, but as I mentioned before there is an incomprehensible amount of adolescent humor, and, as you might expect, more profanity than you can shake a stick at. I’m not criticizing the content of the game so much as the fact that a lot of the mature content feels forced for the sake of pushing the “you’re in hell” theme, as opposed to things like the disturbing and darkly interesting bosses and their back-stories. The game also suffers from frequent glitches, ranging from mild texture errors to freezing .
There’s no denying that Shadows of The Damned is not for everyone. Its dark, violent tone and its vulgar humor will turn a lot of players off immediately. EA knew this when they published this game, however, and aimed their demographic narrowly at consumers who know Shinji Mikami or Suda 51 by name. It’s an understandable shame EA didn’t make more of a mainstream push, but if you’re looking for a solid game with a lot of fresh ideas that work surprisingly well together, you should certainly give Shadows of the Damned a look.
