Now that I’ve finished Resident Evil 4, I wanted to go back to what spawned that interest in the first place, Shadows of the Damned! Shinji Mikami and Suda51 team up to create a buddy comedy romp through hell. And what a romp! I’ve already played this game before, right when the remaster came out, but something happened and I didn’t do any kind of write up for it. This also happened right around the time when Xbox decided to automatically change a setting where all screenshots would be deleted after 30 days or some shit so by the time I got around to getting the screenshots off they were gone.

This time through I played on hard and did not start a new game plus file. It’d been enough time and Catrena was watching so I didn’t want them blowing past the cut scenes. The parts that tripped me up the first time were still there, but I don’t think the games difficulty is to blame. The gunplay is fun when it works. The guns are cool and interesting but get worse the more they are upgraded. The teether needing to lock on instead of just being a precise machine-gun is a downgrade.

The monocussioner - the shotgun-like thing that is trying to be some kind of dick joke and also a play on the word “concussion” - is weird because it doesn’t give you a scattershot, it’s more like shooting a hulk fist. Unless you hit them just right you run the risk of simply wasting ammo. The second upgrade to that where you can shoot up to 4 skulls is useless - why would I want to waste four skulls instead of one.

The final upgrade to the shotgun is the worst part of the game. Lobbing a giant, exploding skull is almost never something I’d choose to do, except when forced to solve a puzzle or beat Fleming, the final boss. Fleming will protect himself with this green shield that has three holes in the top, the problem is the aim is never precise enough. Immediately after firing the skull bowling ball, Garcia freezes up making it impossible to dodge for like 2-3 seconds. The mechanic needed more time to cook! I liked it when you actually bowled or played plinko with it, but that’s it.

There are lots of little homages to horror movies peppered throughout, my favorite being the Evil Dead 1 & 2 cabin. Having a deadite pop up out of the basement hatch & showing the first-person perspective of demon spirits flying through the woods to possess the cabin was also a nice touch. We even get the possessed girlfriend dancing in the woods!

This moment is undercut by needing to flee from Zombie Paula … for whatever reason. If Garcia could run when you asked him to and didn’t get stuck on every obstacle or corner or incidental piece of furniture it wouldn’t be so bad, but failing because Garcia can’t get out of his own goddamn way is frustrating.

But that scene in the cabin was great - those are the things that make me really like SotD, it knows its ridiculous, it clearly had a hard time making it out of the AAA studio system a coherent game but did despite the challenges, and it’s unlike most other Third Person Shooter of the era. It stars a man oozing with masculinity who isn’t afraid of talking about how much he misses his wife or how he wishes he could taste the salad she excels at making. Garcia is muscular but doesn’t look like a monster and he’s not a military man - he’s just a cool fucking guy.

I had a friend that went to a good university on the east coast and in one of his writing classes, his professor - a smart sonuvabitch - would say “no manner of good writing can compete with a well timed fart” and that’s how I feel about the humor in Shadows of the Damned. Johnson is funny! He’s juvenile and insincere but dammit he can land a joke. He’s a good source of information about the underworld and he’s ride or die for Garcia, but he still needs some erotic foreplay to pop a big boner.

Speaking of the big boner, Here’s the elevator pitch for this section - Garcia and Johnson stage a defense against giant kaiju demons storming through a city full of erotic neon advertisements. In order to prepare, Johnson uses a payphone to call a sex hotline and gets so worked up, he turns into The Big Boner, allowing Garcia to shoot huge payloads at the offending demons. It’s incredible. The best part? It doesn’t overstay its welcome and it’s not crazy difficult. Its not easy! But its definitely passable.

I enjoy the boss fights - all nine of them. They are all pretty good even if they feature a recurring thread of “shoot the glowing red thing.” George’s fights were my favorite - I love the the carnival setting and his second, bigger, goat-horse form - both are great fights and feel at home in the hellish setting.

I also appreciated the random ‘shmup levels where you chase Justine through the clouds. Onion Games made an entire game with this same vibe, Black Bird (which is great) and Suda51 just tosses it in the midst of a romp through hell. The storybook styling is very cool and the music change-up is great. Is it a troll to fight Justine in a slightly easy 2D shoot-em-up? Maybe. But I don’t know if anything else would have lived up to the multi-chapter chase.

I liked the puzzles, including the darkness, I just wish there was a path to upgrade your darkness resistance outside of the health meter. On one hand, Garcia isn’t really getting stronger throughout the game, he can raise his health but that’s about it. Johnson is the one that is really progressing, all the gems are going towards boosting the weapons he can turn into. Something like his torch light could shield you in darkness a little longer before your meter drops down. Its a big part of the game and there are no pathways to feel like you are excelling at it. But maybe that’s the point - you don’t get to control the darkness, Fleming does.

And that’s Shadows of the Damned! It has a lot of great ideas, and if Travis Strikes Again is any indication, was a difficult game for Suda to come to terms with. I hope we see a sequel one day, its got a lot there that could be expanded upon, including Paula’s backstory and her true relation to Fleming. Suda teaming up with Mikami again would be the icing on the cake.