Today, we have a new entry from Rogueside: Devil Jam. No, this is not some sort of satanic strawberry preserves or grapes of wrath jelly; it’s a roguelite survivor game with all sorts of underworld critters to dispatch. Oddly enough, some of them do look a bit like blobs of jelly. Go figure.
Let’s start with the sights and sounds; given the game’s theme, these are rather important. The graphics are rendered with good detail. You don’t have to worry about pixelation, but the top-down view still means things may be a bit small, leaving the finer details hard to distinguish. Generally, the backgrounds and the characters look good.
One oddity is your character and how he moves. If you stand still, you get an endless loop of the hero strumming his guitar, which gets old after a while. When you turn to the left or to the right, your guitarist will spontaneously flip from right handed to left handed playing. This tended to bend my brain a bit when I first started playing.
Since the gameplay revolves around your cursed electric guitar, the audio is appropriately cursed. Just kidding; the soundtrack is well-produced and the tone is good. The only drawback for the music is by necessity; because it has to carry you through uncertain amounts of time, it becomes a bit predictable due to phrase repetition. It isn’t really playing a song in the traditional sense. There are no lyrics, no message, and no beginning-middle-end, just nonstop instrumentals.
On to the gameplay. Since this is a roguelite, be prepared for a lot of level grinding to learn how to survive and gain new skills. There are two paths to skill gains: 1.) pick up stuff on the battlefield and wait for one of the Seven Deadly Sins to give you something, or 2.) save enough gold, blood, etc. from the battlefield and use them to buy skills in the store.
The bad news is that the new skills and attacks granted during combat only last until you are terminated. The good news is that the skills you buy in the store are permanent, but they aren’t cheap. Like I said, get ready for a lot of level grinding to get to a point where you can survive and advance. Like other roguelites, you will get better at surviving a level and eventually get to the boss battles. Considering where you are, the bosses are going to be tough.
The game does have a story…kind of. You are dead, and the devil is contracting you to do some dirty work for him. As you gain skills and get better at surviving the waves of destruction headed your way, your ultimate challenge, which will fulfill your contract, gets closer: kill Death. Yep, you have to defeat Death (good luck with that).
The points where the game is a bit lacking are Legion. OK, so maybe not that many, but since we’re dealing with the Devil, it seemed appropriate (lying is his native tongue after all). The game could use a better introduction and tutorial. What you discover by the meander method is that you need to head out to the battlefield. There, you will simply run around and hope to destroy enough demons and other critters to get to the boss. If you take enough damage, your contract is considered unfilled and you have to start over.
This leads to the next shortcoming: how you fight. Well, you don’t really fight as much as run around. Since this has a music theme, your weapon (the cursed guitar) goes off on the beat. The problem is you don’t get to aim it, per-se; it just goes off in a direction it likes, which is usually behind you. Don’t forget, you’ll be running away from everything, so behind you is mostly good.
There are level maps, but the game doesn’t really tell you how to use them.
Yes, this game could be better with a few things, but it also has some interesting surprises. You probably expect to have to collect resources to buy skill upgrades, and you probably expect to have to collect other resources to get battlefield buffs. What you may not expect is how you can stack the weapons/skills you collect on the battlefield.
As you make your way through the unholy hordes, you will be offered a choice of weapon upgrades. You can select new weapons/skills or you may be offered a more powerful version of a weapon/skill. Here’s where you have to think about things. A more powerful version of something is good, but is it better than having more attacks per round?
The music twist plays a big role here. The background music is in 4/4 time (4 beats per measure). You have access to four columns of weapons/skills and each column activates on the beats, so you can have four attacks per measure. If that weren’t enough, each column/beat can hold up to three weapons/skills. The upshot is that you may be able to stack twelve weapons that all keep going off to the beat. Not bad, eh?
Devil Jam’s story is lightweight, the music is good (but not inspiring), the visuals are well done, and the requirements to beat each boss will keep you re-playing for a while. The weapon/sill matrix is a neat twist, but you will still be doing a lot of running away to stay, shall we say, alive? For the price, it’s a worthy time-waster.
