Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered review

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?

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 memories of playing on a huffing 360 while sitting on my cousin’s bedroom floor—the kind that, maybe because I was so small, felt a lot bigger than it was.

And honestly, for a 360 throwback, it’s looking pretty good. Hell is luxurious after a bit of a remaster. The environments are beautiful and bloody, and the endless parade of demons Garcia meets are an impressive symphony of terror, pleasingly gory and accompanied by a truly ear-splitting cacophony of shrieks and screams wherever they go. Garcia himself is good-looking but wooden, the limp cutscene animation never really giving him much to work with, and the less said about his porcelain girlfriend, the better. But who needs conversation, body language, or emotional acuteness when you have the endless hordes of Hell to demolish? (And now, with the addition of New Game+ mode, the hordes are literally endless!)

So I started blastin’

I’ll be brief with the plot. It’s not hard, because the plot is brief. Garcia Hotspur is a demon hunter. He’s very cool and wears a purple leather jacket with no shirt underneath. Doesn’t he get sweaty? It doesn’t matter. He’s got a beautiful girlfriend, Paula, who gets kidnapped by the Lord of Demons, Fleming, and dragged into Hell. He’s got to get her out! Gotta get that girl. He’s accompanied in his quest by a former demon/talking skull named Johnson, whose main job is to turn into a gun (often) and a cool motorcycle (only once, sadly) and also to make dick jokes.

(Image credit: Grasshopper Manufacture)

They plunge into the depths of the underworld; Paula gets increasingly less dressed as they pursue her; these events are met with the appropriate level of respect and seriousness due to them.

In his travels in Hell, Garcia switches between three weapons: the Dentist, formerly the Teether, a machine gun that shoots the obvious; the Skullgrinder, a shotgun that eventually can also lob bombs; and… the Boner. It’s a handgun that shoots bones. Surely this is the one that’ll get them into the dick joke hall of fame.

In early levels it’s easy to lean on a favorite weapon: ammo is plentiful and none of the baddies give Garcia too much trouble. Later, though, ammo scarcity and enemy diversity makes for much more nervy encounters, like when a shotgun was all I had left to pin down a flying, fluttering Grim Reaper boss, or when a Buzzsaw Demon and his screaming cronies have you cornered and all you’ve got is your imprecise handgun, which barely makes a dent on the core on his back. You can’t just pick your weapon of choice; you’ve got to ration intentionally, and the game is good at pulling you out of your comfort zone, making you scan through your arsenal for every trick at your disposal in order to get through the next teeth-clenchingly long fight.

That’s not to say you won’t have favorites, though: I found myself enamored particularly with the Dentist, though it’s a ruthless ammo-eater, as one good spray at an oncoming mob of demons leaves Garcia with a horde of kneeless, crawling suckers that he can stomp into a mess of red goo.

Much of the intermediate space between boss fights feels perfunctory, especially in the early game. There’s a lot of dialogue between Garcia and Johnson, which is entertaining in the way that the radio is entertaining on a road trip when the aux is broken, and swathes of miscellaneous mob enemies that aren’t really fun until, as I mentioned, you get the gun that helps you turn them into gory bootprints. Every so often Paula will appear somewhere in front of you, looking distressed, and Garcia will gasp at her for 20 seconds before going back to his griping and killing.

Later acts start to get wild, and that’s where the game shines. A 3D platform rotation puzzle level? Yes. Random sidescroller interludes? I’m down. A whole multi-part sequence where Garcia’s Boner gets bigger (oh, god…) and you spend 20 minutes headshotting onrushing cyclopes? Fuck it, we ball. (We bone?) Minigames too often have a tendency to be annoying, but Shadows of the Damned wisely keeps the difficulty of these detours to a minimum, so they never have the chance to be frustrating.

Bosses are the other big standout. Before weapon upgrades the boss fights can feel cruelly long, uneventful and torturous with little room for error; after he gets those big guns, though, Garcia’s braggadocio seems justified. It’s a tastily satisfying experience to dance through stage after stage of a precise, screaming fight, demons coming in from all sides, magazines threatening empty, and still snatch that victory. You start to think, damn, I am that guy. I am super cool demon hunter Garcia Hotspur. I do have a sexy girlfriend who was stolen by the devil. I can pull off purple leather. I will be making this gun even bigger, yes, thank you, please.

I do find it remarkable that, in the cold light of the modern day, Shadows of the Damned has somehow managed to misogyny itself all the way into equal-opportunity objectification. Yeah, it’s not like there are women in this game, right: there’s a picture of a woman, and it twirls coquettishly every so often, and spits out lines that sound like a horny Build-A-Bear, and it serves its narrative purpose. But there’s not really men either, are there? There’s one man. There’s The Man, Garcia Hotspur, jack-of-all-trades and jackoff fantasy, so much a masculine archetype and a macho ideal and a Cool Guy that he’s somehow spun all the way around to being a Ken doll covered in Sharpie tattoos.

All of the other men are—well. They’re dead! They’re rotting, nude, dickless. The opposite of virile. Let’s follow the gun-as-penis metaphor to its natural conclusion, okay: Garcia is fucking his way through Hell, and he’s doing a great job at it. There might be a girl at the end, but at the end of the day we’ve still spent most of our time with a hot guy and his boner.

I can’t say I didn’t have a good time with Shadows of the Damned. It’s just that it’s a weird game to revisit: At its best, it reminds me of my youth, when every new game had the potential to be something just as marvelous and ridiculous, self-indulgently fun and self-indulgently stupid. At its worst, it also reminds me of my youth, but more of the part where I and everyone else I knew was confused and horny and dealing with it in ways that were not societally recommended.

So, okay, the dated humor is a bit of a boner-killer… but it’s a hell of a ride.

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