Some of these demos on Steam are fairly generous. I spent a bit over 2 hours each with Hellraiser Revival and Onimusha Way of the Sword. Here’s a few thoughts on both of them.

Onimusha Way of the Sword

I won’t lie: What drew my attention was the handsome face of the main character on the title card. Musashi Miyamoto greets you with a badass look on Steam before you even start the game.

Just look at this badass guy!?

Musashi is usually depicted in a rag-tag style and Onimusha isn’t an exception. But it doesn’t end there, because Capcom put in some effort to give him personality even in mid-fight cutscenes. He’s not stoic and indifferent when a 3 meter demon pops up in front of him. He’ll look startled, exhausted, fierce, or cocky after a victory. This deserves mention because A) a lot of games don’t give the main character’s face that much attention and B) a lot of protagonists are simply to cool to look exasperated.

This demo includes two bosses and a bit of running around and slaying minor demons. I played it over the course of two evenings. I have to admit, the first evening, all I thought was “I guess it’s what you’d expect?”

You get your heavy and light attack, your dodge, your parry. You’re a sword-wielding guy who slays demons who drop souls. It’s something like Nioh and Sekiro. It seemed uninspired and even formulaic at first.

But somehow, throughout the next day, my mind went back to the monster-slashing and I was looking forward to the evening when I could continue playing the demo. It is what you expect, and it’s also pulled off well enough.

Visually, the designs and environments are nice and all, but the look of the game can feel a little flat, as if everything’s evenly lit. Perhaps that’s due to my modest hardware, although at least the game run smooth enough (albeit on low settings).

All in all, I feel like I might want to keep playing Onimusha, but I also don’t feel like I’m missing out on much by not playing it. Mmh, I’ll keep an eye on the price I guess.

Hellraiser Revival

So, I called the visual of Onimusha’s visuals “flat”. Hellraiser uses light and shadow a lot better. Hard shadows, reflective surfaces… the visuals are neat. There are a LOT of unique assets of distorted and mutilated bodies. I wonder what it must feel like to be an artist on a game like Hellraiser Revival and stare at body horror all day long.

The game opens with the protagonist and his girlfriend having SM sex while playing with the well-known puzzle box. What led them to take this box to bed? Imagine your partner in bed suddenly whipping out a Rubik’s cube…? But here, the protagonist uses it to scratch his GFs back and that in turn opens the box and summons the Cenobites. Unlike most of the movies, the game doesn’t waste any time introducing them and you get to make a short trip to the Cenobite world right away.

Most of the demo plays a lot like Resident Evil 7. You sneak around and search the environment for clues, scavenge for resources and avoid enemies. Towards the end you get more weapons and fight a few members of a cult of Cenobite-cosplayers.

Then, when the demo ends, it shows a trailer that makes the game look like it wants to be Doom Eternal, with the protagonist smacking all kinds of human and non-human heads in with a big mace or eviscerating people close up. I’m not sure what to make of this, it seems at odds with what the demo gameplay was like. You wouldn’t expect a power trip in a Hellraiser game, right? Not as long as you’re playing as a human, at least.

All in all, this Hellraiser game has some nice, gore-y visuals but personally I feel like the combat and puzzles are more annoying than fun. The Cenobite cult with its messages written in blood all over the walls also feels like I’ve seen it so many times. Sure, what can you do… a game needs fodder-enemies after all, right? Right??