Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered review

pcgamer.com:

I'd say video games have come pretty far from where we started. It's a mature medium now. We make games for adults, about real problems people face in life; we have that sense of veteran superiority, of understanding that we're in our prime, and that we've evolved to the point where we can be proud of the things we're making. In the face of this, it's important to occasionally return to our roots, to remember where we came from and the questions that we used to ask, such as: how many dick jokes can conceivably fit in one 10 hour videogame?

What is it? A hellishly fun and hellishly stupid remaster of a demon-hunting shooter from 2011.

Release date: October 31, 2024

Expect to pay: Unconfirmed

Developer: Grasshopper Manufacture

Publisher: Grasshopper Manufacture

Reviewed on: Windows 11, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS, 16GB RAM

Steam Deck: Unknown

Link: Steam

Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered does a noble job trying to answer this and other important questions, the majority of which are also penis related. It's an unfiltered adolescent fantasy, a shameless barrage of jokes that haven't been funny since middle school, a lurid triple-X dream that simultaneously manages to be impossibly childish.

It is also, I regret to inform you, an incredibly fun game.

While I was busy remembering how much potty-mouthed juvenilia we were getting away with in the aughts-to-twenty-teens, I was also remembering how we'd basically perfected the art of the mid-length action game. Shadows of the Damned starts and finishes in less than a dozen hours, which these days seems positively quaint, and yet it feels mechanically substantial. The difficulty curve is well-tailored; the levels throw variety at you without getting confusing; the lean three-weapon roster means that every gun gets its day.

And yet I'm not in it for 40 hours filling out skill trees or collecting shiny things, I'm just in it to get my girlfriend and get the hell outta Hell. It's the kind of game I have fond