The first time I saw this game, it piqued my interest. Not many games do that for me anymore.
It’s a mainly monochromatic 16-bit game, but the lack of colour only serves to accentuate other parts of the game that pop with bright highlights. The soundtrack is mainly an ambient background drone which only serves to put you on edge – perfect usage in this game.
The main goal of the game is survival. You play a nameless survivor on a series of floating islands. The only tools you have are a gun, a bucket for water, and an axe. You have a limited amount of stamina every day to perform actions to replenish your supply of materials, so you must carefully plan out what you do every day. Once you run out of stamina, you can continue to wander around, but you can no longer collect any more resources. You must sleep to advance the game, and during the night you use up a portion of what you collected. If you don’t have enough to satisfy your needs and run out of resources, it’s game over.
As time passes, you become keenly aware of something other than the deer in the forest. The titular devil slowly makes its appearance as time passes, and you must find ways of avoiding the devil and not getting smoked by the fireballs it launches.
I will stop my description there, to avoid any further spoilers. This game is full of secrets, and is best experienced with fresh eyes and little to no knowledge of what you will find.
I was first introduced to the game through a YouTube video that I accidentally allowed to autoplay after what I had originally watched. It was someone I had watched before, and I did enjoy his videos, so I allowed my gaffe to run through.
I am very glad I did.
The YouTuber who played it made light of many parts of the game, and while I don’t fault them for that, if I had played this game without the impression from their playthrough I would have enjoyed this game much more for what it was; a dark survival game with elements of exploration and puzzlers. So while I won’t discourage you from searching the game up, just know it will invariably taint your experience.
Another thing about The Devil Haunts Me is it is a game developed during Game Jam 2018. For those of you unaware, Game Jam is a video game creation contest where applicants are given a limited amount of time to create a game from scratch using only a theme as their springboard. Depending on the complexity of the requirements, the amount of time given is between 24-72 hours. Given that, the quality of this game, with only minor bug fixes and tweaks after release, is amazing. The game itself can easily be finished in an hour or two, but the number of secrets and the different endings you can get make the game easily replayable.
All in all, I quite enjoyed it, and for a quick escape, it’s a great game to add to your library. It’s free on Steam and on their website, lum-scum.itch.io/the-devil-haunts-me.
