Hella Remastered review – fresh hell

When you buy a Suda 51 game, you should know what you’re getting into. The renowned game director is known for his wild ideas, unique creations and immature jokes. They are not to everyone’s taste, which is represented by the uneven review scores. But if Suda 51 has a fan, I am; the person who still considers kawaii fever dream Lollipop Chainsaw as one of their favorite games of all time.

The original Shadows of the Damned was released in 2011 and was the second collaboration between Suda 51 and the legendary Shinji Mikami. The pair previously brought the cult classic killer7 to the world, and they feel like the perfect duo to develop some weird fun through hell. Shadows of the Damned is a 13-year-old game, and it makes sense that certain aspects have aged badly, making it the perfect target for a remaster.

Shadows of the Damned tells the story of Garcia Hotspur, a demon hunter who travels to Hell to retrieve his beloved Paula from the Demon King, Fleming. The story is simple, but it’s just a vehicle to deliver fast-paced writing and gameplay. In our Suda 51 and Shinji Mikami interviewSuda explains that the game feels fast and intuitive compared to modern games that focus on appearance, resolution and high-quality graphics, and we have to agree.

Garcia has access to three different types of weapons, and each of them has its own use cases. While you’ll find yourself passing through a lot on the fly, you’ll also have to deal with the hordes of demons that come at you relentlessly. It’s difficult to line up a headshot when so many are coming at you at once, but their bodies absorb bullets like sponges. The fights are tense and stressful. I played on the easiest difficulty setting and the early demons could kill me in two hits. There are also much of enemies, and cutting them down is the biggest part of the game.

When I first played I thought Garcia was meant to be drunk, but then I realized that gyro controls are enabled by default in the sparse options menu under “Movement Controls”. Disabling them wasn’t an option, though movement with the analog stick is too slow for the game’s fast pace, even at the highest sensitivity setting. I found myself struggling with balancing the camera and gyro controls, especially when you have to switch weapons and fend off large numbers of enemies.

Suda says that the final version of Shadows was the sixth attempt at the script, after the editor’s input ITand it feels like the development could have been strained. Suda 51 has a lot of unique and interesting ideas, but then you see them reused more than once, like the kaiju style fights with the massive gun or the paper levels. While these might have been interesting once, they become mundane by the third time. Garcia also has limited barks, and while I love a good man-feature joke as much as the next funny girl, it started to grate on me by the hundredth time I heard it.

Another aspect that feels rushed is the interesting antagonist you see in the first chapter of the game. You get her backstory and see her multiple times, only to have her boss fight reduced to a papercraft level that leads to a lackluster ending. If the paper boss fight had been followed by a traditional 3D one, we would have felt a more satisfying end to her arc. The level design is also quite simple and it feels like the sponge enemies and relentless hordes are there to reduce the minimum run time.

The biggest disappointment of the remaster is how many opportunities were missed. The hitboxes are oddly small, and you often find your bullets shooting right through enemies you’re sure they’re supposed to hit. While weak points are displayed on enemies in bright red, it still feels uncertain where you should aim. There are also no manual save points, which is annoying when the autosave sometimes doesn’t work. I would start the game in the morning only to find that I was sent back to a previous checkpoint.

Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered’s biggest sin is the lockable cutscenes. Returning to a checkpoint and then being faced with three unlockable cutscenes in a row is just plain bad. There’s no excuse for not allowing players to skip stages in 2024 other than to complete the game, and it’s honestly been one of the biggest sources of frustration. Another sin of the game is the instant kills that are strewn about, and most modern players refuse to deal with them.

Shadows of the Damned was developed under restrictions, and Suda 51’s unique ideas were reused, not allowed their time to shine. The remaster was the perfect opportunity to add quality-of-life tweaks, remove repetitive parts and add new sections. Also, the difficulty settings don’t seem to reduce the number of bullets each enemy has to take out, which leads to the game continuing to repeat itself. I love Suda 51’s work and really wanted to love this remaster, but it just misses the mark in so many ways.

Score: 5/10

Version tested: PS5