Seventy-four seconds. That was it. That was the longest continual stretch I was able to stay alive in the video game “Devil Daggers,’’ a brutally difficult shooter for Windows PCs released by Sorath last month.
You’re dropped in the middle of an arena with a dagger in front of you. You pick it up. You hear a ghastly noise. Suddenly, a demon of some sort is shooting skulls out of its body. They race toward you. You dispatch them — left-click is like a shotgun-blast, right-click like a machine gun with a very narrow spread — and then the demon from whence they came. Then there’s another demon, and more skills. Then more, and more. Other monstrosities pop up and they, too try to kill you.
It quickly becomes insane. The entire game is running around, trying not to get hit and to survive as long as you can. “Devil Daggers’’ is a deadly chase in which the inevitable result is your own death at the hands of grotesque abominations. And once this occurs, a leaderboard pops up showing how you rank against the rest of the “Devil Daggers’’-playing world (suffice it to say my 74 seconds did not stand up well to international competition).
The leaderboard has helped spark a community around the game, and at its core are YouTube videos of people’s best runs. The world record is up over 10 minutes now, and given the insane rate at which the game’s level of challenge ramps up — again, things feel quite hectic after 60 seconds — it’s pretty amazing to watch the top runs. It’s like some kind of twisted ballet, with the player jumping and weaving through an unforgiving hellscape.
This is really stripped-down gaming, both aesthetically and functionally. Your arsenal is extremely limited; I didn’t even unlock the homing weapon you apparently get eventually. The palette is mostly gray, brown, and red, and all you do is run around shooting hordes of monsters. It’s like a minimalist take on the “Serious Sam,’’ which famously celebrated the jittery caffeinated id of the first-person shooter genre.
And it works. I don’t quite know why, but it does. It might be that “Devil Daggers’’ simply takes what makes first-person shooters so fun — constantly checking to see where you are positioned relative to your enemies and their projectiles, strafing endlessly to avoid them, and quickly processing a lot of visual information to triage your current threats — and dumps all of it on you at once, without any filler. At a time when first-person shooters seem to be getting increasingly loaded down with features, achievements, weapons, and storyline, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, “Devil Daggers’’ yells “Just stay alive!’’
One would think that a game that kicked my butt after 60 seconds would make me want to give up in frustration, but I don’t. I want to try to survive to 75 seconds, and then 90, and then, eventually, 120. But I’m a realist: I’m never going to be able to get anywhere near that 10-minute mark. I’ll leave that to the experts.
Jesse Singal can be reached at jesse.r.singal@gmail.com.
