Devil Daggers is a mystery of a game: one big contradiction. It’s simple but complex, chaotic but calm, beautiful but horrifying. It’s a game that, at first glance, isn’t worth writing about - but here we are.
For the uninitiated, here is a brief description of Devil Daggers.
- It is a first person shooter.
- You have two weapons, a rapid-fire spray and a shotgun-like blast.
- The entire game takes place on one circular platform, which shrinks over time.
- There are different enemies. They spawn at preset times, in preset configurations.
- The goal of the game is to live as long as you can.
- Touch one enemy, and you die.
- If you die, you start all over again.
Let’s lay out Devil Daggers’ crimes, the reasons for which it should absolutely not capture anyone’s interest. First off, The enemies are too predictable. Circle strafe enough, and it seems as if they’ll never hit you. The stages, too, are dreadfully repetitive. The same enemies spawn at the same times, all the time. Then, every time you die, you have to do it all over again! Same repetitive thing, over and over. It’s only made worse, of course, by those leaderboard replays; if you can watch others do it, what’s the point? You can just reproduce exactly what they do!
Well, all that’s true. So why’s it so damn compelling?
The first few times you play, the game simply seems impossible. The spires emerge from the darkness, and from within, skulls pour forth. Your ears are assaulted by the dry clacking of bone. Skulls come at you left, right, and center, and though you dodge and shoot to the best of your ability, it always seems like you miss one, and you die. But the leaderboard urges you on, and you start again.
As time progresses and you get better, you’ll start living through that first swarm, maybe with some skulls and a couple of spires intact. Just as you feel like you’re getting your bearings, starting to get a hold of the situation, a crackling sound begins playing, and - what the hell is that - you’re faced with a giant tentacled monster, and on the opposite side of the arena, a bigger spire. Skulls spew forth, spiders burst from their eggs, and you’re quickly overwhelmed. You start again.
Then you get past that, and you start learning to clear the enemies out. You can pretty reliably get to 100 seconds, now, but you just can’t get that centipede. Try as you might, it goes unchecked, zoning off huge sections of the arena. In a panic, you slam the wasd keys furiously, staring at the screen, unblinking, just trying to eke out a few more seconds. Skulls everywhere. More spires looming out of the darkness. You know there’s no coming back from this. Dodge. Aim. Shoot. Until finally - New high score!
And just as that comes up, you lose track of where you are and fall off the edge of the arena. You slam your fist down in a fury, but, with the other hand - you start again. And so it goes.
To get far in Devil Daggers, you must be absolutely efficient - and I mean “absolutely” in the most literal way possible. Every movement and every shot must have purpose. Miss too many of the enemies from one stage, and you’re sure to be overrun on the next. The game state is always in flux, always on the tipping point between calm and chaos. Taken one wave at a time, the enemies are laughable. When there are multiple waves coming at you from left and right and you hear one spawn right on your back, you’d better hope your dodges are on point.
It’s true that the enemies are predictable, when it comes down to it. The thing is, keeping track of so many enemies is just plain difficult. Lose track of a single flying skull, and - bam - that’s enough to take you out. And when that does happen? Well, the fault is yours, and you know it. Maybe you missed a shot on one of the skulls. Maybe you were moving backwards, and accidentally ran into a spire. Maybe you just lost track of where the edge of the stage was. The game is punishing, but always fair.
In all this chaos, Devil Daggers mixes in a devious game mechanic: the gems. Spawners and large enemies drop red rubies which, if you collect enough, confer powerful weapon upgrades. After the second upgrade, each gem picked up will give you ammo to launch homing daggers which cut through huge swathes of enemies. Here’s the catch, though: you only collect gems if you stop shooting. While it’s possible to pick them up by running over them, it’s very difficult. Stop shooting, and they come zooming towards you.
It’s brilliant. You’re always just on the point of being overwhelmed, and you never quite feel like you have time to stop shooting - but you really need those gems. Reaching certain points without those upgrades is suicide. Picking up those gems forces you to be even more pinpoint accurate. It would not be too far off the mark to call Devil Daggers “Efficiency: The Game.”
Once your times start going up, you start getting these upgrades more and more consistently until you have a gameplan. At x seconds, I’ll get this upgrade, then I’ll destroy these spire, and as long as I take all the gems from the centipede, I’ll get the next upgrade at y seconds, and then… well, you haven’t been past that point enough times to know. Eventually, you must die and start again, with nothing. As your run times go up and up, so does the time wasted with each failed run.
It really does feel like this should be the death of the game; it’s almost as if you’re punished for getting further. In similar games, there’s always something to look forward to. In Dark Souls, there’s always a boss to beat. In Hotline Miami, there’s always a level to get past. Even Teleglitch humbled itself enough to give checkpoints when you made it past a certain level.
In Devil Daggers, though? It’s always just the one platform, always the same configuration of enemies. No matter how well you do, you always die. As your times go up, you beat your high score less and less, until every run below your high score just seems like wasted time.
But are they wasted? I’d argue not.
First, the easy thing to see: in each run, your aim and movement get better. That should be readily apparent - if you kill enough skulls, you get better at killing skulls. This contributes to your overall success, and it’s a good feeling when you are destroying each wave as it comes out, instead of leaving them for cleanup later. Die and revive and play long enough, and you’ll get very good at it.
The second point I’d like to make here is harder to explain. The essence of it is this: Each of the earlier stages makes you better at the ones later, in a way that’s not just about better aiming. If you become good at handling the early stages efficiently, you are better equipped to handle the later ones, too.
It’s easiest to see this progression in one specific pair of stages. When you first start encountering the big spires (which spawn more dangerous enemies and take more to kill), they come in pairs along with a small spire which spawns on the other side of the stage. These pairs spawn four times, with a significant gap between spawns.
It takes a fairly long time to become proficient enough to clean up the spires in time for the next pair. But then, not too long later, the exact same spawns occur - big spire paired with a small spire - but faster. Sure, you can cleanup all the enemies given 20 seconds, but 10 seconds? Another question entirely. So you die, and you go back to the slower spawns, and you become more proficient at it. Soon, you clean them up with time to spare. Soon, you find that you can handle the later, faster, stages too.
This is the most direct example of the brilliant design encapsulated in the stages. Each builds upon the past ones in such a way that they’re not just obstacles, they’re practice. Time spent on earlier stages are not a waste of time, it’s further experience.
Even better, there’s almost always more to do. The first stage, with four small spires, becomes extremely easy to clear later on. But instead, what if you leave those spires up until the next stage? You can give yourself more practice at evading and clearing large swarms, and gather more gems to boot.
I’m pretty proud of my high score of 430-odd seconds. It’s good enough to place me in the top hundred of players. The next position up on the leaderboards, which is always shown at the end of a run, is just .2 seconds beyond my run. I’ve beaten my score many times before, and it will happen again.
Even so, I’m a far cry from the top of the leaderboards, nearly two hundred seconds behind the first position - an aeon of shooting and dodging. But you know what the coolest thing is? Even though that #1 spot is far above my skill, it doesn’t seem like such an insurmountable peak.
You see, the true power of the leaderboards is not the visible feedback of how far you’ve come. It’s the replays. At any time, you can watch the run of anyone in the world. I believe this is the final and possibly most crucial part of the game.
Of course, there’s the obvious “oh, I can see his strategy, now let me use it” - and that shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s a great way to get yourself unstuck. But I believe that the replays serve an important purpose beyond just being strategy guides: more importantly, they are inspiration.
A perfect run of Devil Daggers is an opportunity to see an artist at work, one that paints the floor with blood of bone and tentacle. Every dagger shot is intentional, every jump is calculated. It’s breathtaking and inspiring at once. In any other game, you’d be going I can never get there. In Devil Daggers? You watch that replay, and you go, Holy shit. I want to do that. And you know what? You can do that. The proof is right there, in the replay.
This is the secret of Devil Daggers: despite all the demonic themes, it is the opposite of hopeless. The game is cheering you on all the way, always reminding you that you’re not alone in this. You can get better. Your score is beatable. The very foundation of Devil Daggers is hope.
It’s in the way you tangibly feel your progress.
It’s in the way perfection looks effortless.
It’s in the way your heart pumps, your head aches, and your stomach contracts when you are so close to a victory - and then, when you achieve it, it’s in the sheer feeling of triumph.
You may die, but you’ll always come back better for it.