Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered review

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I need to know

What is this? A fiendishly amusing and fiendishly stupid remaster of the 2011 demon-hunting shooter.

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Release date: October 31, 2024

Expect to pay: Unconfirmed

Developer: Grasshopper production

Publisher: Grasshopper production

Review: Windows 11, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS, 16 GB RAM

Steam deck: Unknown

To combine: Couple

I would say that video games have come quite a long way from where we started. It’s already a mature medium. We create games for adults that talk about real problems that people face in life; we have a sense of veteran superiority, an understanding that we are at the peak of our career and that we have evolved to the point that we can be proud of the things we create. In the face of this, it’s critical to go back to our roots from time to time, remember where we came from and the questions we asked ourselves, such as: how many dick jokes can fit into one 10-hour video game?

Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered has done a noble job of trying to answer this and other critical questions, most of which also involve the penis. It’s unfiltered teenage fantasy, a shameless barrage of jokes that haven’t been amusing since middle school, a bleak triple-X dream that’s also impossibly childish.

It is also, I regret to inform you, an extremely enjoyable game.

While I was busy reflecting on how many ridiculous youngsters we could get away with in our overdue 20s, I was also remembering how we had basically perfected the art of the mid-length action movie. Shadows of the Damned begins and ends in less than a dozen hours, which seems quaint these days and yet feels mechanical. The difficulty curve is well adjusted; the levels provide variety without confusion; a modest three-weapon set means each weapon has its day.

And yet I’m not in it for 40 hours filling out skill trees or collecting shiny things, I’m just in it to get my girlfriend and get out of hell. It’s the kind of game I fondly remember playing in 360 while sitting on the floor of my cousin’s bedroom – one that, maybe because I was so miniature, seemed so much bigger than it actually was.

And honestly, for a 360° it looks pretty good. Hell is luxurious after a minor remaster. The environments are attractive and gory, and the endless parade of demons Garcia encounters creates an impressive symphony of terror, pleasantly gory, accompanied by an ear-splitting cacophony of screams and screams wherever they appear. Garcia himself is handsome but wooden, the animation of the limp cutscenes never gave him much to work with, and the less said about his porcelain girlfriend the better. But who needs conversation, body language, or emotional acumen when there are endless hordes of hell to destroy? (And now with the addition of New Game+, the hordes are literally endless!)

So I started shooting

Briefly about the plot. It’s not challenging because the plot is compact. Garcia Hotspur is a demon hunter. He is very frigid and wears a purple leather jacket with no shirt underneath. Doesn’t he sweat? It doesn’t matter. He has a attractive girlfriend, Paula, who is kidnapped by Demon Lord Fleming and dragged to Hell. He has to get her out! I have to get this girl. On his journey he is accompanied by a former demon/talking skull named Johnson, whose main job is to turn into weapons (often) and a frigid motorcycle (only once, unfortunately), as well as tell dick jokes.

Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered

(Photo: Manufaktura Grasshopper)

They plunge into the depths of the underworld; As Paula is pursued, she dresses less and less; these events are treated with the respect and seriousness they deserve.

During his travels through Hell, Garcia switches between three weapons: the Dentist, formerly the Biter, a machine gun that fires at obvious places; Skullgrinder, a shotgun that can eventually also throw bombs; and… Boner. It’s a gun that shoots dice. This is definitely the one that will get them into the dick joke hall of fame.

In the early levels, it’s uncomplicated to fall back on your favorite weapon: ammo is plentiful and none of the villains cause much trouble for Garcia. Later on, however, the ammo shortage and enemy variety make for much more hectic encounters, like when all I needed was a shotgun to disable a floating, flitting Grim Reaper boss, or when Buzzsaw’s Demon and his screaming buddies caught up with you, and so on you’ve got it, it’s your an imprecise gun that barely makes a dent in the core on his back. You can’t just choose your weapon of choice; you have to ration rationally, and the game does a good job of taking you out of your comfort zone, making you scour your arsenal for every trick available to survive the next teeth-clenching fight.

That doesn’t mean you won’t have your favorites, though: I fell in love with The Dentist in particular, though it’s an absolute ammo guzzler, as one good shot at an incoming mob of demons leaves Garcia with a horde of kneeless, crawling suckers that he can fall into a pile of red goo.

Much of the in-between space between boss fights feels superficial, especially in the early game. There’s a lot of dialogue between Garcia and Johnson that’s amusing in the same way that a radio is amusing on a road trip when the aux unit goes bad, and swathes of various brain foes that aren’t really amusing until, as I mentioned, Get a weapon that will lend a hand you turn them into bloody footprints. Every now and then Paula will appear somewhere in front of you, looking worried, and Garcia will stare at her for 20 seconds before going back to complaining and killing.

The later acts start to get crazy and that’s where the game shines. Puzzle level with 3D platform rotation? Yes. Random cutscenes in sidescrollers? I’m downstairs. The entire multi-part sequence where Garcia’s boner gets bigger (oh god…) and you spend 20 minutes headshotting speeding cyclops? Fuck it, we’re playing. (Will we be bored?) Minigames too often tend to be irritating, but Shadows of the Damned wisely keeps the difficulty of these detours to a minimum so they never have the chance to frustrate you.

Another standout feature is the bosses. Before weapon upgrades, boss fights can seem excruciatingly long, uneventful and torturous, with little room for error; But after getting these large guns, Garcia’s boasts seem justified. It’s a deliciously satisfying experience to dance stage after stage of precise, screaming combat as demons attack from all sides, warehouses threaten empty warehouses, and still snatch that victory. You start thinking, shit, me I am this guy. AND I am super frigid demon hunter Garcia Hotspur. AND Down have a sexy girlfriend who was stolen by the devil. AND Power remove the purple skin. AND will be make this weapon even bigger, yes, thank you, please.

I truly find it remarkable that in the chilly delicate of modernity, Shadows of the Damned somehow managed to veer from misogyny to the point of equal opportunity objectification. Yes, it’s not like they exist women in this game, right: there’s a picture of a woman who every now and then squirms flirtatiously and spits lines that sound like a horny “Build-A-Bear,” and it serves its narrative purpose. But there aren’t really any men either, are there? There is one man. Is ManGarcia Hotspur, the professional and the jackoff fantasy, so much of a masculine archetype and ideal of macho and frigid guy that he somehow morphed into a Ken doll covered in Sharpie tattoos.

All the other men are… well. They’re dead! They are rotting, naked, without dicks. The opposite of masculine. Let’s follow the gun-like-dick metaphor to its natural conclusion, OK: Garcia fights his way through hell and does a great job of it. There may be a girl at the end, but in the end we still spend most of our time with the handsome guy and his cock.

I can’t say I didn’t have fun with Shadows of the Damned. Except it’s a strange game worth revisiting: at its best, it reminds me of my youth, when each recent game had the potential to be something equally wonderful and ridiculous, self-indulgently fun and self-indulgently stupid. At its worst, it also reminds me of my youth, but more of the part where I and everyone I knew were confused and horny and dealt with it in ways that weren’t socially recommended.

Well, the dated humor is a bit of a killer… but it’s a lot of fun.

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