There is a new co-op horror game on Steam that is being developed in Germany. Horror fan Cortyn took a look at the early access version.
As you know, I like horror games. Whether it’s Dead by Daylight or creepy visual novels where I cook my roommates. When there is a new horror game, I like to take a look at it.
From the developer RecklessGames UG, who is of course from Germany, we were provided 4 keys for testing. So I took three of the biggest scaredy-cats from my friend circle and told them that they should “try a game with me” – they only noticed it was a horror game when they started the download. That only made it more fun for me.
What is Demonic Episode about?
The story behind the game is quite simple. You belong to a group of content creators who visit “lost places” in their spare time, where it is said to be haunted.
You can choose from 8 characters, each belonging to 4 “classes”. While the cameraman has a longer battery life and also possesses a night vision device, the medium can perform rituals and detect the status of the demon.
Each character has its own specialty – although you only really need the medium to banish the demon. At least in theory.
Upon arriving at the destination, the game takes place in 3 phases. In the first phase, you try to get an overview of the area. You look for locked doors, accessible paths, and places to discover. Most importantly, you need to trigger “paranormal events”. These can be flying objects, a spontaneous scream, or a strange apparition. In the best “jump scare” manner, the camera immediately zooms in on the source of the apparition – causing many frightened screams from the teammates, especially in the first match.
Once you’ve discovered enough, the dark entity appears and phase 2 begins. In our matches, this was either a mysterious, floating woman or a black devil. Both entities can (in theory) be repelled with the flashlight, giving you a few seconds to breathe before the next attack begins. If you fail, a character gets injured and is dragged to a random location on the map.
Trying to find the group in complete darkness with only a limited flashlight is quite difficult – especially when you don’t yet know the maps by heart.
In phase 2, you need to uncover more details about the creature. These can be books that contain clues and ritual locations where you can perform the banishment of the entity.
In the final phase, you lure the creature to the prepared ritual location and banish the entity – at least if you manage to do it. We never succeeded, but we are probably not to blame. More on that below.
I want to explicitly praise the atmosphere we had in the first round. Everything just fit. The passage of time, the encroaching night, the ghostly woman rushing out of the darkness to abduct us. It was really creepy, and I still have to smile when I hear the panicked “Here, she comes from here!” screams – completely forgetting in the panic that with a “here” no one can make sense of anything.
In absolute darkness and with only limited flashlight light, the atmosphere becomes really eerie. Simple, but good.
An early access, but far from beta level
But now we come to the negative experiences. Because as much fun as the first few minutes were, the game quickly lost its charm for two main reasons.
Even on the easiest difficulty, we were unable to successfully banish the demon. The “devil,” which we encountered in our second and third matches, was either bugged or just poorly balanced in both games. Not only did it seem not to care about our flashlight half the time, when it was driven away, it would only run 5 meters away before attacking the next one of us.
This did not feel particularly fair and only resulted in us desperately trying to repel the old creature for about 5 minutes before it ended up killing us one by one.
The second point is that we find the advertised replayability doubtful for the time being. Because while it is true that the events, such as ritual locations or supernatural phenomena spawn randomly on each map, this is not enough to generate repeated enjoyment.
Especially the first phase, where you search for paranormal events, quickly becomes tedious. You just run back and forth across the map to fill a bar and hopefully trigger the last event, which then initiates phase 2. The first time it was cool and creepy – but by the third time it became tedious and just monotonous. There needs to be more variety and more exciting gameplay to truly be interesting. Wildly running around to trigger the same 3 jump scares is only creepy for a few times.
Ultimately, we concluded that “Demonic Episode” is still in a very, very early state for an early access title.
We agreed that Demonic Episode can definitely be a fun pastime – the potential is there. The screams of my friends were real, and I had to hold back my smile significantly in the first hour. Everyone was also very impressed that only one person is behind this project.
But until the game is really finished, a lot of work still needs to be put in.
If you’re looking for a co-op horror game from Germany with potential and want to shape the development through feedback, you should take a look at Demonic Episode. If you’re looking for a fully fledged, finished game that captivates for hours at this moment, you should stay away from the project – or check back in a few months to see what has changed.
From today (October 26, 2023), you can purchase the early access version of Demonic Episode on Steam.
