Devil Daggers

Developer: Sorath
Publisher: Sorath
Music: Sorath
Platforms: Windows, Linux, Mac
Release Date: 18 February 2016
Genre: First-person shooter

Devil’s Daggers opens up in a dark room, and in front of you is only one thing. A floating dagger dressed in white light, giving off a holy presence. In no way does this scene represent what you are about to witness. As you walk towards it you are teleported to another dark room, but this one is not the same. It is faintly lit and horrific sounds start whirling around you, soon finding out that you are on a circular platform with nowhere to go.

You are armed with the power to shoot glowing red knives and you can hear terrible sounds getting closer, then out of nowhere a devilish horde of flying skulls come soaring at you. As you kill to survive more and more monsters appear, all in different shapes and sizes, yet all of them having the same horrifying look. All you can do is keep the killing going with no end in sight.

Devil’s Daggers is a first person shooter (FPS) game that combines the power fantasy of games like Doom with the disempowerment fantasy of horror games like Five Nights at Freddy’s. This creates an interesting take on a mechanic used to empower players by matching it with mechanics that go against this notion, which turns into an interesting dynamic we have not yet seen in first person shooter before.

The gameplay is fairly simplistic in it’s take, as the player you have one weapon shown from the perspective of famous retro titles such as Doom 1 or 2. This weapon has two attacks, one streaming shot which just lets you spray as much as you want, the second is a form of a burst shoot. You as the player move faster than your projectiles, which allows you to strafe and create streams of knives flying around, this adds on to the difficulty of aiming. Enemies spawn endlessly and designed to overwhelm you in different ways.

The audio is creepy and early quiet, not utilising much in terms of musical score but instead focusing on sound effects to create a creepy and eerie feeling. The best way I can describe it is this: Imagine closing your eyes and you are falling asleep, you start hearing something moving closer to you, trickling almost like small footsteps creeping closer. Then your head fills with the sound of spiders and centipedes crawling around inside your head… Not terrifying at all.

I truly enjoyed Devil’s Daggers, it is an interesting take on the first person shooter genre which primarily works around empowering the player however, utilising the creepy audio and overwhelming amounts of enemies I rarely felt empowered.

The game is also very addictive. I found myself getting to a state of dying, restarting, dying, restarting for quite sometime. This is thanks to the extreme difficulty mixed with the online leader board system. The game has one achievement and that is to survive for 5 minutes, giving you a comprehensive goal to work towards.

Reviewed by William Haumann @William_Haumann on March 18th 2020