Let's start this review about the elephant in the room. It's a very big elephant in the room. Huge, in fact. With graphics being the very first thing you're going to see in a game, it's extremely important for players. Jrago The Demon Hunter, however, has the exact opposite of an aesthetic. The characters use pixel art, (ms)paint, realistic scenery, digitized people, and every single type of art you can find. Any from the asset you can find, they grabbed it and put it into the game. No rhyme, no reason. So if you're expecting the game to find something nice to look at, you might want to move on.
Now that that's out of the way, let's talk about what we have before us here. Jrago The Demon Hunter is a solo-dev game with some metroidvania mechanics that gets pretty extremely hard. At around 20 hours, it's a decent length for the size. That also includes a lot of the option stuff, though honestly most of the "option stuff” is pretty required. Again, this talks about the difficulty.
Mechanic-wise, you run around to the right and kill dudes, kind of like in Castlevania. Find a weapon, get levels, look for new armor or other weapons, feel stronger. Fairly normal stuff there. The enemies are also not particularly intelligent, since they mostly just walk towards you to kill you. The bats/birds are annoying, though. One quick note: there is a finite number in a map. You can sit in one place and kill all of them at you after you get through a certain spot.
Jrago himself gets a lot of little spells he can use, which go from "required" to "did I ever use those ever?" My main gripe, which has actually been fixed in the sequel, is the double jump. Most games, you'd just jump twice a second time when you get that skill. Here, you have to actually open your menu and select jump first before you use it. It kind of grates on, but you get used to it. Again, the sequel fixed this issue. Oh, and make sure you're reading the manual in Steam. It tells you about things like, jump then crouch down in the air and you'll send in a double attack with spells and projectiles and ♥♥♥♥. Pretty useful.
The maps are mostly okay. After you get past the first boss or so, the areas open out a bit and there's some exploration here. Just remember, you can go down to find new places sometimes. Sometimes. Other times, they're dead pits. It's up to you to find out if they are or not. Mostly you just take damage and end back way a bit, so it's not the worst thing ever. One thing that I do would have liked was making save spots a bit more easily to find them. There are a couple spots where are just attrition battles with how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ many enemies there are. Just remember to save often. If you died when you hadn't saved in a while, guess what? You're doing it all again.
With the bosses, they generally don't need you to remember any specific patterns. They're usually stat checks or finding the right weapon to use. That, or figure out how to break the enemy AI. There's a lot of little things you can do, like certain bosses can't hit below you. If you can get below them, just hit the ♥♥♥♥ out of them and they can't do anything to you. Finding these can be pretty fun, honestly. A win is a win.
Oh, and I'd be doing a disservice by not mentioning that the music is delightful. Just some of the best butt-rock ♥♥♥♥ to hear while you're playing. They have a couple of soundtracks as well. Honestly, it's worth it for those alone.
The story, though? It's okay. I will be honest and say that I wasn't able to read the story as I played, but that was an issue of mine than anything. Mostly, the story is a few bits of talking from NPCs (talk to them three times), and then you just put things together from there. There are also bits of Bible stuff as a flavor. I will say, all the lines of the characters are spoken. That's a lot of work. They're not, like, the greatest VAs ever, but it's there.
Normally, I'd be done talking about the game itself at this point in the review, but I do want to talk about some of the other work the dev did around this game. First of all, this game is Steam Deck Verified. No one had to do that, but they sure as did for this game. Not only that, it also has Steam Cloud, Achievements, oh, and guides? There are seven guides on Steam, all written by the dev, telling you how to play the game or do achievements and ♥♥♥♥. It's really nice to see that much work put onto their game.
Now, having seen that, you're starting to get a better idea that the dev here loves their game. They have done their best to make sure that the game would be as best as it could be, doing things that they didn't even really need to do. You'll also notice in the credits of the game that nearly everyone in the VA credits, they all seem to be family, in-laws, and presumably friends. And even things like things that may have seemed "bad" tend to be charming. Things like that one character in the beginning that looks like it was made out of MSPaint? That's the dev's daughter and she did the art.
Jrago The Demon Hunter may not be the best game in the world, but I had fun with it while I played it. And honestly, the amount of work was put into the game, I can’t really say anything bad about it. I want every game that I play to have that much love into it.
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If you’d like to see the game in motion through my eyes, [url=https://kuoushi.com/videos/jrago-the-demon-hunter-complete-archive/]take a look at this complete archive of me playing it[/url] here. It should give you a good idea of how the game plays and what to expect.
