I have been playing through Demon’s Crest on SNES with the extensive aid of the rewind function on the emulator, this game is so hard. I really like it aesthetically and in theory, but in terms of the execution it is pretty clear why it isn’t more fondly remembered.
A lot of the backtracking is tedious, and most of the special abilities you gain are redundant or inexplicable. (The “Claw” weapon exists only to shoot blobs of goop on spike walls, an ability you never actually need to use in the game. Very soon after you acquire the ability to fly straight up.) There is a certain amount of charm in that too, in that because of the redundancy there are multiple solutions to certain environmental obstacles but it’s just not really enough to sustain interest.
Also, the last boss is ridiculously hard. I had gotten good enough at the game to barely need to rewind to fight some of the later bosses, but in this even rewinding constantly is not enough. I have no idea how people were able to do finish this. I know it is a cliche, but playing games like this really makes me marvel at the fact that in the olden days people could release games fully knowing that almost no one who bought it would be able to finish it–that is, in fact, what made it good. I have never thought of myself as a hardcore gamer, but there is something kind of charming about a game that expects you to never complete it. The game seems utterly uninterested in your ability to complete it–it’s fine without you. I can’t work out much of the plot, but Firebrand is portrayed as enough of an anti-hero that you’re left to wonder whether it might be better for everyone if you didn’t finish the game.
You can actually challenge the final boss very early in the game, and fight a much easier version of him. When you beat him, the bad ending basically says you created a power vacuum by taking out the despot without being able to replace him and plunged the whole world into chaos. It’s pretty metal. I don’t know what the “real” ending is like because I will probably never finish it.
It’s weird to play a game that is, tonally and mechanically, basically a Metroidvania before Metroidvanias existed. Because of that, it feels less like Castlevania or Metroid and more like Iron Sword (Wizards and Warriors 2), of the Fabio cover, another game whose (seemingly) cavernous depth feels like it is content to remain unexplored, without any real momentum to push you to see every corner of it.
Even though I can see that this aspect comes basically from poor design and technology limitations, I think it is kind of what I have always loved most about video games. Because the player is not really guided on rails through every challenge and obstacle, or constantly goaded forward by NPCs giving you hints and clues about how to proceed, the result is actually a very effective simulation of a wholly autonomous parallel reality, for which the actions of the human player are an unwelcome intrusion.
This is a goal that game developers are still constantly chasing–the illusion of an autarkic digital realm–but it always feels like the more ambitious they get the more anxious they become about whether or not the players are able to actually see all of the work they put into it. Of course no actual world is like this. If you’re an unwelcome outsider in a new place, you wouldn’t dare to dream that one day you would know every inch of every field, see the inside of every resident’s house, find the locations of all of the most secret treasures.
I am making a big deal out of something that’s obvious, all of this makes perfect sense. No matter how complex and realistic video game simulations are, they are still exist to provide players with a fulfilling experience. We have a threatening and endlessly vast world right in front of us, there’s no reason to make another one. But doing this poorly so many times is part of the reason why video games are so full of generic ‘white savior’ / ‘chosen one’ narratives, where you start out a powerless outsider and end up as the only one who has truly mastered the alien land. It gets old!
Procedural generation seems to offer an alternative to this, in that they provide an endless sequence of new worlds that no one expects to fully explore in any given playthrough. But because it’s randomly generated it feels kind of like cheating. I guess for me knowing that real people put the time and effort into creating something that they didn’t necessarily expect anyone else to ever look at is part of the appeal. Because of this, or maybe for some other reason I haven’t figured out yet, games like this never really feel like “exploring,” they’re more effective at creating unexpected challenges and scenarios.
This sort of brings me back to the only interesting idea I’ve probably ever had about video games on this forum, a game that has 99% of its content buried behind some obscure and complex puzzle, so that you could conceivably play through what felt like an entire game without ever realizing it was there. I called it “Icebergvania” for obvious reasons.
Since then there have been a few games that have toyed with this idea, or maybe just Frog Fractions (?). I think it’s a really interesting that when this happens it is typically either played as creepy/horrific, or used to comment on the media texture of video games as software products (or both). Both of these things are great, but still not quite what I have in mind when I think about what games “should” be like now that we live in the future.
I’m told that Breath of the Wild does something kind of like this, but because it’s Zelda I can’t accept that the game isn’t also designed for completionists. It also just feels very… welcoming? Like you’re supposed to explore all of it, even if most reasonable people probably won’t. The perfect thing for me I guess would be adding in just the right amount of menace and unfriendliness to make it feel like everyone in the game world was getting on more or less fine without you.
As far as I can tell, there’s only one NPC in Demon’s Crest that doesn’t either try to kill you or offer you some kind of service in exchange for money. It’s this chilled out green demon who leans on a fountain in the only city in the game. (The only other things you can do in the city are break windows and buy items). No matter how many times you see him, he says “I haven’t seen you around here before.” Then he asks if you are a stranger. If you say that you are, he explains that the red demon Firebrand, who nearly burned the demon realm to the ground and killed everyone, has escaped, and tells you to be careful. You are the red demon Firebrand.
