It's been getting on for fifteen years since we last played a game quite like Demon Gaze. And we mean that in every way possible.
As a first-person, grid based dungeon crawler, games like Demon Gaze have been few and far between in recent years. Sure, there's been the odd game here and there, but it's been nothing quite like the heady days of Ultima Underworld and Eye of the Beholder on the Amiga - games which only the most experienced of players will likely remember now (but in true Pointless fashion, if you knew those at home, very well done to you). Looking through the eyes of your protagonist as you make your way around oddly angular dungeons, occasionally being jumped upon by all manner of fantasy ne'er-do-wells, at which point the game switches to a turn based battle, it's fairly standard role playing stuff, but it manages to feel unique thanks to its perspective.
Step forward, and get into a battle - but a handy map helps you see where you have and haven't been.
Beyond the unusual genre though, Demon Gaze is also a little bit weird. OK, we say weird - we mean utterly bat-crap crazy. After working your way through a character creator that lets you alter things other games don't, but gives you little say over things every other game does (no matter whether you choose a man or a woman, your character will always be considered a "human male", for example), you're thrust into the game proper. While you may look like a normal human/cat/rabbit thing on the outside, your main party trick is that you can stare a demon in the face and win - by which we mean, capture its soul using your eyes alone. And that's bound to come in handy, and there's just under a dozen demons running riot in the land of Demon Souls waiting to captured - and once caught, you'll be able to call upon them in battle to unleash their special powers.
Where the game gets weirder though, is in the Inn that you call home, which is watched over by an unusual woman called Fran. With its wide eyed (and equally wide chested) buxom anime women, effeminate shirtless guys, and strange half cat creatures thrown in for good measure, the Inn may be a strange place to spend an evening, but it's also the place where the story sections take place. And its these that can seem a little... weird.
Whether it's the item shop elf taking you to the bath house and strutting his stuff with only a loincloth covering his dignity; the Inn manager stripping down to her undergarments when you start to doubt whether she's a human or a demon, while the game zooms in on her chest, and she encourages you to "Touch me!" (luckily, no fondling is required, as all you have to do is press X to carry the conversation on); or the Inn's strange cat-maid-thing being caught sniffing the boss's underwear, this is about as weird as these sort of games get - although unfortunately, without the adolescent setting and quality writing of games like Danganronpa, it can often just feel awkward here.
Yes...
Still, the story sections are by no means the majority of the game, as most of your time will be spent wandering around the game's themed areas, as you seek to wrest back control from the titular demons, and draw them out into a confrontation. You do this by hunting down things called "circles" (which, oddly enough, are shaped more like an eye), which are essentially special tiles that the demons control. Step onto it, and you'll be flung into a battle with some baddies - defeat them, and you win control of the circle, and can use it as a save point in future (which comes in incredibly handy). Take control of half of the circles, and you'll come face to face with a less-powerful version of the demon itself - win them all, and you'll be going one on one with the demonic one themselves.
The battles in the game, which you'll end up being thrown into both randomly, and when you step on a square that has a battle icon on it, are mostly standard role playing fair. Taking it in turns with the baddies to dish out the punishment, you and your party will have an uphill struggle on your hands, as Demon Gaze is actually rather challenging - at times, too much.
With a standard selection of moves to choose from (normal attacks, magic moves that boost your stats or let you heal, special powers that let you attack multiple enemies at once), it's a fairly basic battle system, but it does its job nonetheless. One of the more interesting tweaks is that enemies that attack you come at you in "rows", which can present a number of problems. With different weapon types having different ranges - swords and the like can only hit those on the front row, but slings can shoot further back - periodically during the battles, your foes will shuffle their ranks, which can often happen just at the wrong time. When the enemy you were wearing down scuttles to the back row, he's suddenly free to hurl abuse at you from where he's effectively untouchable, which adds an extra layer of strategy to proceedings.
One of the coolest things about the game is the way it lets you choose both a voice for your character when they get hurt, and a separate voice for when they attack. Hence ours charged into battle with a deep, manly "HUURRRAAGGHHH", before recoiling with a whimpering "Ow!"
Still, it's the aforementioned difficulty level that's by far the biggest frustration here. Even when you're first starting out, it's all too easy to get swamped by enemies, who can overpower you through their sheer numbers alone rather than their incredible strength. Luckily, there are a number of artefacts in the game, which grant you special powers when equipped, that can be used to counter this - but as far as we're aware, their distribution is random, meaning you'll have to hunt it out. A power called "Slash" lets you attack an entire row of enemies, which goes a long way to levelling the playing field - but you'll only be able to use it if you can find it.
While you can bolster your party's chances in the usual ways, by upgrading equipment, finding new swords and shields in amongst the loot you get for defeating enemies, and by levelling up, you'll never feel like you're really becoming a strong character in the game, and often only just seem to be keeping pace with the enemies, who get a whole lot harder a lot faster than you do. While you can mostly defeat the toughest baddies early on with a mixture of perseverance, levelling and a few hundred potions, by the time you get to attempting to catch the third demon, only a short distance into the game, things quickly get annoyingly hard.
Even if you've been grinding your way through levels, gaining experience, and battling everyone you come across, you'll find yourself coming across a demon that can kill you in two hits, and certain enemies around the area that can kill you in one, while you barely scratch their annoying armour. Even if you turn the difficulty down to the easiest of the game's four levels, it still doesn't make much of a difference - enemies can still kill you in a single hit, and with the irregular save points, you'll be viewing the title screen and retracing your steps a lot more than you'd hope.
And it's this that's perhaps Demon Gaze's biggest downfall. It's fine to provide a really hard role playing game - but at least give us the option of tweaking it, and making it that little bit more accessible for those who aren't quite such fans of masochistic games. When your four difficulty levels range from "foot stomping" to "Vita smashingly" difficult, chances are you'll just end up turning a large audience off.
While Demon Gaze is a fairly standard role playing game by all accounts, despite its lesser known sub-genre, it never really does anything special. With some oddly handled innuendo and uncomfortable moments, and bosses (and even some normal enemies) that can kill you in a single hit, no matter how much you've levelled your character, it's a game you can't really lose yourself in as much as you'd want to.
Format Reviewed: PS Vita
