Devil’s Dare is a walk down memory lane… with zombies (review)

I’m not typically clamoring to play games that feature zombies. I have no prejudice against the undead, I’d just rather they didn’t exist, or were at least segregated from people like me. A few seconds after booting up Devil’s Dare, however, I could see that Singapore’s Secret Base had managed to nail my particular soft spot for light-hearted zombie antics. I also enjoy a good old school beat ’em up, as well as allusions to the video games of my childhood, so the ingredients were there. The question is, does Devil’s Dare deliver or wuss out?

Background

The game starts out with a crew who works in video games shooting a video. A horde they initially mistake for cosplayers surrounds them. After an opening cutscene with allusions to The Ocarina of Time and Mortal Kombat, among others, the game sends you on a pixelated, arcade-style journey through four different levels. Upon selecting your character, he or she will take on a stylized form, with mundane weapons like mops and wrenches becoming Thor hammers or sais like the ones Raphael of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles wields. There’s also a dog becoming a mech and a few other nods to geekery.

Parody is Secret Base’s secret sauce, so if seeing Alien reimagined as Gaijin or battling horror movie baddies with Link’s gear from The Legend of Zelda series sounds like something you could get behind, read on.

Gameplay

A beat ’em up in the purest sense, the game is reminiscent of 16-bit era side-scrollers like Final Fight and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time, with certain aspects evoking the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game. The game also resembles the more modern Scott Pilgrim vs. The World with its sense of humor, cultural allusions, and upgrades. The inclusion of a permadeath feature sets it apart from the latter, as once you’re
dead, the game deletes your save file.

After choosing among the games four playable characters, you can choose which of the four levels you want to play. They include a sewer, hallway, train, and road, and each has its own array of zombies to fend off. The bosses are clear homages to eighties and especially nineties franchises, but I doubt that any of the references will be lost on anyone old enough to be reading this.

Throughout the levels, you’ll find yourself battling zombies ranging from armless running ones to pregnant fetus-projecting freaks. Sword-wielding child zombies and the obligatory zombie dog also make an appearance, along with some environmental traps. If you’re playing alone, the game can definitely be quite challenging, so you’ll want to take advantage of the local multiplayer if you have a fellow nineties horror fan to team up with.

Each character has basic, running, and special attacks, the latter being particularly important, because cash and health drops are significantly larger when enemies are finished with a special move. Just like in the Mortal Kombat franchise, the game lets you know the time is right by giving a “finish him” indication to incapacitated enemies.

As Devil’s Dare is quick to point out, you’ll want to get used to delivering finishing blows from the start, as cash is the means to upgrading your skills with the random item unlocks at the end of each level, as well as the only way to stave off permanent death by buying revives. Each successive revival will cost more cash, and continues are no more easy to come by.

While the arcade style setup leaves the permadeath feeling less novel than it would in game from another genre, the loss of your hard-earned upgrades makes the sense of loss a real one. Don’t die if you can avoid it.

A sample moves set from one of the characters.