SECRET AGENCY
Devil Daggers strips the retro shooter back to its barest essentials. The world recedes into darkness a few feet from your face, the shadows spewing floods of enemies. You have a single weapon to repel them: your hand, which for some unexplained reason can shoot energy. You hold on for as long as you can – each decimal point of a second hard-fought – and then try to beat that score. This throws a stark spotlight on the simple feel of moving and shooting, something all the developers I speak to are trying to recapture. “I spent a lot of time studying what makes Doom’s combat so much fun,” Szymanski says of Dusk.
But Devil Daggers also cuts away another treasured aspects of these games: the level design. The classic ’90s approach, Szymanski says, was using “shortcuts and backtracking to make the level itself an experience, and not just a series of environmental setpieces in what effectively amounts
to a hallway”. Dusk’s levels are a great example of the form, looping around and inside of themselves, as if artist M C Escher was set loose with Doom’s modding tools.
And that’s without mentioning the secrets. In Dusk or Ion Fury, it’s not just about skidding around like you’ve got an Acme-equipped coyote on your tail. To get the best stuff, you’ll need to slow down, study the wall textures for a telltale crack or discolouration. Tap the use button, and a panel might slide away, putting a new weapon in your hands, or even leading to an entire secret level.
KNEE-DEEP
Coming from modern shooters, the thing that stands out most is the refreshing lack of interest in imitating reality. Maps are explicitly death traps, the level designer as cackling Bond villain, with a conveyor belt of enemies to headshot. They don’t all take it quite as far as Devil Daggers, but these games are essentially the first-person shooter with everything removed but the engine.
The rest “no cutscenes, carry all the weapons you want, ludicrous gibs, run really fast, no tutorials” as Oshry effortlessly rattles off for me, before adding “monster closets and coloured keys and doors everywhere” too – that’s all just optional set dressing, really. Oshry understands the value of these nostalgic signifiers, and New Blood’s marketing leans heavily on it.