Devil Daggers

Devil Daggers is a shooter video game with gameplay experienced from a first-person perspective. The goal of the game is to kill demonic enemies and survive for as long as possible. Devil Daggers opens with the player character standing in a shadowy room; in front of them is a floating dagger illuminated by a spotlight. Upon retrieving the dagger, the player is transported to a flat, floating platform arena cloaked in darkness.

In the arena, demonic enemies begin spawning. Initially, a series of tentacled, towering creatures spawn and start releasing swarms of flying skulls that pursue the player. As time progresses, more exotic creatures that pose a greater threat and exhibit different behaviour begin to appear. Each enemy makes a unique and continuous noise, so that the player is able to recognise what type of enemy is approaching them.

Devil Daggers was developed by Sorath, a Melbourne-based independent video game developer. The development group was formed by Matt Bush, a member of Dustforce creators Hitbox Team. The game's art direction and rendering engine were designed to reimagine the aesthetics and graphical style of video games from the 1990s. This was achieved by making use of unfiltered textures, jagged 3D models, and the deliberate implementation of polygon jitter and texture warping found in early 3D games.

Jitter and warping were often considered technical flaws of PlayStation games; however, the recreation of these effects in Devil Daggers is to make enemies shudder and ripple during movement. Enemy designs are hellish, with some entities taking the form of insectoids with skeletal features. Audio is composed largely of distorted and abstract sounds with compressed, digitised screams used to produce unsettling noises for the creatures.

Devil Daggers received "generally favourable" reviews from critics according to review aggregator website Metacritic. Critics compared the gameplay and graphics favourably to first-person shooters of the 1990s such as Doom and Quake. Reviewers were pleased with how Devil Daggers offered a stripped-down experience of these games, and provided a fast and pure gameplay experience.

The game's fluid movement system was compared to arena shooters Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament 2004 by Edge magazine. They welcomed the inclusion of advanced movement techniques, saying they felt "fresh" when implemented in a survival context. They also thought that Devil Daggers refined on so much of the borrowed elements, that it would be inaccurate to simply call the game a "nostalgic throwback". Devil Daggers was considered to be a perfect distillation of old school arena shooters by Zack Furniss, writing for Destructoid. Kill Screen writer Davis Cox praised the "frenetic, bullet hell" nature of Devil Daggers, but felt that there was opportunity to incorporate more interesting levels and spaces into the game.