Tag: demon
Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon – The First Preview
After three games of air juggles, pistol dances, hair-centric finishing moves, and universal acclaim from both critics and fans, PlatinumGames is dramatically remodeling the established Bayonetta formula. Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon is arriving only five months after the release of the erstwhile Bayonetta 3, and it brazenly trades in its third-person, button-mashing precepts for what is, essentially, a straight-up Zelda facsimile in the Super Nintendo tradition. The camera has been yanked back to an isometric vantage point, the levels are deliberately balanced between doses of environmental puzzle solving, tricky combat, and light platforming, and the sweatless, stylish tone of the mother series has been replaced with a somber tale about a vulnerable girl in an uncaring world. It is, in other words, the last thing you’d expect from a game bearing the Bayonetta name. That will undoubtedly turn off some fans of the franchise, but personally, I already can’t wait to play more.
Platinum starts subverting your expectations from the moment you get your hands on Bayonetta Origins. The game is played by piloting two distinct characters, by using a detached Joy-Con in each hand. On your left, you have Cereza — a younger, softer Bayonetta — who is just becoming accustomed to her nascent magical powers. (No, she is not yet brandishing firearms, nor is she dressed in stilettos and corsets.) On the right, we have the Lost Demon — known as Cheshire — who has possessed the patchwork cat doll owned by Cereza, and is able to deal massive payloads of damage with brute strength. You’re going to be navigating the world with both of these characters using each joystick, which brings to mind Josef Fares’ lowkey 2013 adventure Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. PlatinumGames has drummed up a number of clever navigational puzzles that require tight collaboration between the partnership to overcome. A carnivorous plant in the way? Perhaps Cereza can call on the spirits to bind it to the ground, while Cheshire uproots it from the earth. Does our prodigal demon need to reach a cliffside that’s just out of his grasp? Shrink him down to doll size and chuck him up there. Then he can morph back into his monstrous scale and get down to business.
It took me the length of the introductory level I played to become truly comfortable with this esoteric control scheme — the learning curve is going to be pretty steep, even for seasoned gamers. It gets especially hairy in combat, where you’ll be navigating two distinct move sets simultaneously, as you attempt to nullify all of the restless imps that want you dead. Cheshire handles the bulk of the offense by swinging his massive body around the arena, while Cereza plays more of a support role with her spellbook and a selection of stat-boosting items mapped to her D-pad. All of this is a far cry from the breezy 1,000-hit combos you might remember from other PlatinumGames titles, but I found myself enjoying some of Bayonetta Origins’ more tactical principles. The studio hasn’t lost any of its sublime mechanical fluidity, even as it has slowed down the pace.
Bayonetta Origins’ world also trades in the urban streets and moonlit cathedrals of the established canon for a fey, verdant forest — very Brothers Grimm — and a story that literally unfolds through a children’s picture book. It looks gorgeous on the Switch, wielding lots of deep blues and soft greens, which helped me immerse myself in the idea that the eight-foot-tall librarian I previously controlled in other Bayonetta games — the woman who cackles as she eats people with her hair — was nowhere to be found in this realm. Cereza is a teenager on the absolute precipice of her journey, and Origins matches those circumstances with an ethereal wistfulness. Yes, even Amazonians have to start somewhere.
It remains to be seen if Bayonetta Origins marks the beginning of a divergence with the overarching Bayonetta timeline, or if it’s simply a one-shot Platinum was cooking up as Bayonetta 3 approached its street date. Regardless, it’s nice to know that we’ll still be getting new games in this universe from a variety of different perspectives. Sometimes Bayonetta is carving up the forces of Hell on top of an 18-wheeler, other times she’s wandering through an enchanted woodland with a raggedy cat doll who also happens to be her guardian angel. Witches contain multitudes.
New Demon Slayer Trailer Highlights Japan’s Most Powerful Demons
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‘Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon’ drops March 2023
Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon has premiered at The Game Awards, where a trailer also debuted for the franchise’s upcoming spinoff. Like its name implies, Bayonetta Origins tells the story of Bayonetta when she was Cereza and has only just summoned her first demon Cheshire. The trailer gives us a glimpse at the story and about how Cereza explores a forest despite her mother’s warnings. It also shows the game’s storybook elements, as well as some bits of gameplay with and without Cheshire.
Bayonetta Origins will be available on March 17th, 2023 for the Nintendo Switch only. You can pre-order a digital copy of the game from the eShop right after The Game Awards wraps up, but you can also purchase a physical copy when the title launches.
The Gaming Shelf Is Not a Demon… Yet
October might be over, but spooky season lasts until Thanksgiving in my house. While people are returning from Big Bad Con and getting over their candy-induced sugar highs, I’ve been collecting TTRPGs like dice sets, and I’m thrilled to share some excellent picks from across the indie-verse.
Hyper Demon review
Hyper Demon Review – Slayer
Doom might be the most renowned shooter that launched in 2016, but the year also played host to another exceptional one: Devil Daggers. With a focus on the most basic attributes of a shooter, Devil Daggers shone with its extreme difficulty and exceptionally high skill ceiling, inviting run after run for hours on end. In many ways, Hyper Demon, the next game from developer Sorath, is the logical next step of that formula. It’s every bit as grueling and engrossing, with even more mechanics to wrap your head around during its intense but short runs. It’s also far more approachable than Devil Daggers ever was, making its compelling action more inviting.
While Devil Daggers was focused solely on survival, Hyper Demon is all about aggression. Each round starts with a timer at 10 seconds, which immediately begins to tick down. Each enemy kill increases the timer by three seconds, encouraging you to string together kills in an elegant way to keep the action flowing. The game doesn’t end when the timer reaches zero; instead, your score is determined by the amount of time on the clock when you die (or manage to reach the game’s ending). Passive play, though technically a lot safer, won’t improve your standings on the leaderboard, so much so that some of your shorter, more unhinged runs might yield better scores than ones that lasted twice as long.
An expanded repertoire of mechanics, when compared to Devil Daggers, helps increase the pace of the action to match the new objective, too. Each round still plays out across limited floor space that you can easily fall off of, but you’re able to move around it much faster thanks to air dashes and chained bunny hops, the latter of which can be done indefinitely if timed right. Being able to get close to enemies to blow them away is half of the challenge, while the other is determining how best to take them out quickly. Like Devil Daggers, you can hold down the shoot button for a steady barrage of bullets or tap it for a deadlier, close-range shotgun blast. These are enhanced with a laser attack that you can fire off if you stop shooting long enough to manually absorb crystals that enemies drop on death, offering a precise, long-range option for your trouble.