08.58
style
The premise to Shadows of the Damned is simple-ish, but again, strange. Garcia Hotspur's crazy (no, really, she's completely out of her mind) girlfriend Paula has killed herself, and the lord of Hell, Fleming, has claimed her as his own. So Garcia's off to the City of the Damned to get her back, with only his Johnson to help him.
Yes, that was a dick joke, and get used to it. Shadows of the Damned leaves no stone unturned in its quest to find (and f**k) every possible opening for a joke about a penis. It's not subtle. It's not even especially clever most of the time. But it tries to compensate by being as unabashed and gigglingly self-aware about it as possible. And it almost pulls it off, unless, of course, you're past laughing at genital humor. If that's the case, you'll want to get off at the next stop.
Mechanically speaking, Shadows of the Damned is a collection of strange, arcade shooter conceits stuffed into a game that seems like it's poking around the edges of a modern third person action game. Garcia wields Johnson, his former-demon-turned-swiss-army-knife-of-hell-knowledge-and-pain-dispersal companion, in one of three different weapon forms: a pistol, a shotgun, and a machine-gun. Johnson can also fire out a light-blast that has various effects – it incapacitates weaker enemies, and it can chase away darkness during one of Shadows of the Damned's many dark-light puzzle sequences.
The City of the Damned is frequently home to giant pockets of inky darkness that will slowly tear Garcia apart – it is called Shadows of the Damned, after all – unless, that is, he can figure out a way to chase it away. The particulars become more complicated over the course of Garcia's feel-good trip through the underworld. Early on, a quick light-shot into a mounted (but alive-ish) goat head is enough to clear it up, but later on you'll be shooting multiple balls of blood snaking vein-like off a central hub of darkness spewing demon pubes and… well. You get the idea.
The problem here is that none of this is particularly interesting. Combat feels clunky, which is a combination of issues perceptual and mechanical. The camera is zoomed in much too close to Garcia to have a good view of what's going on when he's aiming, and Garcia is yet another third-person shooter plagued by molasses arms. On normal difficulty, the only danger you'll ever really face are from enemies hitting you from off camera because your field of view is so small. Granted, you're not stuck in place while you're aiming, but otherwise, Shadows of the Damned plays like a game from 2005, not 2011.
This carries over into Shadows of the Damned's boss fights, which, for better or worse, play like they were designed a decade ago. I'm cool with the idea of shooting a weak spot. I can accept that Shadows of the Damned is a capital "V" Video Game, and I often enjoyed the subtle (and not) references to what seemed to be Capcom arcade and NES titles from the 80s in particular. But the constant cheap knock-downs and excessively punitive tactics of later bosses take them from fun to tedious in short order, and it doesn't help that they last much, much longer than they should. The only thing more boring than fighting the same enemy for 20 minutes is dying most of the way through said boss and doing it all over again.
And repetition is really Shadows of the Damned's worst enemy. You'll get some weapon upgrades, and the scenery changes, but you're doing the exact same thing over and over again, from the obvious moments (kill wave after wave of enemy until the game decides its time to move on) to the less obvious (many of the darkness puzzles feel identical). Even when Shadows of the Damned introduces new enemies, you'll be managing crowds more or less the same way. Every game is a feedback loop, sure, but Shadows of the Damned feels more like running laps than most. Interaction with everything boils down to shooting it or hitting it, unless, of course, you're jerking it off.
No, really.
But here's the thing. I enjoyed my time with Shadows of the Damned, for the most part. The game part has a few surprises in store, specifically the super-stylized side scrolling sections (to say more would spoil them for you if you haven't seen them yet). The main character bosses, the ones explored in their own twisted storybooks dotted around the City of the Damned, are interesting and usually fun.
But more than anything, Shadows of the Damned's style and the clear homage it pays to the exploitation cinema sub-species known best via Tarantino and Rodriguez's Grindhouse is what kept me going. It's full of gorey imagery and graphic nudity, and we're not just talking a little bit of it. Piles of bodies and giant scenes of exposed flesh play major roles in Shadows of the Damned.
But it doesn't stop there. About half of one of Shadows of the Damned's lengthy chapters is an extended tribute to Raimi's Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2. There's a plethora of references in the game to the kinds of movies that I grew up watching or desperate to watch, if only my parents weren't looking. To steal a line from my last preview of Shadows of the Damned, it often felt like executive producer Suda 51 and I were sharing a moment, a convergence of minds based on a shared love for the weird VHS heyday of horror and twisted comedy. And that's something I've never gotten from a video game.
Closing Comments
This is the inherent conundrum of Shadows of the Damned. Your own tastes will determine whether it's more or less than the sum of its basically functional but not-especially-interesting parts, and the attitude and style it carries like a chip on its shoulder. As an action game, Shadows of the Damned is a passable exercise in a few interesting ideas often buckling under the weight of controls and level design stuck firmly in the past. But as a weird tour through a Hell we haven't seen before, with a love for subject matter that neatly sidesteps the likes of other Grindhouse-inspired games over the last few years, Shadows of the Damned is an experience that's worth having... for a particular audience.
by: Arthur Gies
Posted in: Adventure
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