Unholy Heck! Devil Daggers Sounds Amazing
'90s fever dream FPS
Hot dang, Devil Daggers [official site] is one of the best-sounding games I've heard in yonks! The circle-strafing, leaderboard-climbing FPS is a heck of a looker, sure, with creatures of tentacle and bone and unfiltered texture rearing out the darkness, but good grief you need to hear this too. Distorted abstract roars and screams and groans and gunshots all come together in a wonderful/terrible soundscape of ultraviolence. Slip on your headphones or turn up your speakers and tape your jaw shut for this:
Oh! Isn't that great? Also, the circle-strafing and rocket-jumping and monster-shooting are great too. It looks great. That's all the nuance you're getting out of me.
I do really like its style of unfiltered textures, jaggedy 3D models, and the jitteriness of vertex animation, combined with designs way too intricate (and unsettling!) for the era it's drawing inspiration from. The devs say, "[. . .] our general aesthetic guide for the engine and art was '90s fever-dream' which gives us liberties to make the game look as you remember or imagined games to look like, not actually how they looked!"
Devil Daggers is being made by one member of Dustforce devs Team Hitbox together with some chums. It's a score-chasing FPS with leaderboards to battle over, which I'm up for - it looks hectic as all heck. Neatly, it'll let you watch other players' replays from the leaderboards to see how it's done.
"Coming soon to Steam" is all the devs have to say about when it'll come out. Do check out its site for looks at more of the wonderful/terrible monsters. Watch this skelesnake dying! Those lurking spiders! Whatever the hell these squidmonoliths are!
I've thought of Brutal Doom as the fever dream of a young murderfan, but Devil Daggers is much more like what went through my head. For a non-violent alternative fever dream to tide you over, you might find Doomdream interesting too.