9/11/20 Clash at Demonhead (1989)

Clash at Demonhead (1989) developed and published by Vic Tokai for the NES. I don’t generally like the term “Metroidvania,” but this game has been called an early one. In truth, it’s ironically more like Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse. You play as Bang, whose island vacation is interrupted by a call telling him that the creator of the Doomsday Bomb, Dr. Plum, has been kidnapped by a man named Tom Guycot, a skeleton guy. The reason I liken it to Castlevania III is for its map system; see, you start on an overworld with a little over 30 locations interconnected by roads. You pick which route to take, and the ensuing level is your trek down the path to get there. There’s less of an emphasis on exploration and item collecting as much as it is navigating these death marches of roads. The enemies in this game are quite… dynamic, I guess, and will often surprise you by leaping, twirling, swimming, and launching projectiles. Normally, you’d want to introduce enemy behaviors in a safe way for the player to understand, but this game’s open-ended layout presents a challenge that the developers didn’t really circumvent, so they just design the levels as if you already know what the enemies do. Heck, the first screen throws targeting missiles at you, and when you destroy them, their lingering explosions harm you, and these are the only enemies that work like this, so your expectations are kind of thrown for a loop. You can only take about five hits, which I’m still not entirely sure of, because after your health is drained, it seems like you will still get damaged once or twice before dying. Oh, and you’ll die if you spend too long underwater, you find this out the hard way. All of this sounds like shoddy design, and it is, but it doesn’t really infuriate me, because it has a very generous game over system, where you can simply restart from your last point on the overworld. You get, effectively, infinite retries, so it becomes one of those stupidly punishing NES titles that is still possible to get through given enough chipping away. I can’t say one way or the other if I’d recommend, but enter at your own risk.