Jrago The Demon Hunter

EPIC MUSIC?! Check!!! EPIC GAME PLAY?! Check!!! 4K 120FPS....Sure... Maybe, I don't know ... Just, BUY THIS GAME!!! It's Amazing!!!

Jrago: The Demon Hunter is a truly unique and compelling game. The product of a single developer, and his first game, Jrago is a fantastic example of what you can do with premade resources and limited time to create something wonderful that features many of the best aspects of the genre, and achieves its own identity, without compromising on design quality. Rather than an open-ended experience, Jrago focuses on action platforming spread across stages set up as chapters. You begin in Eden, your hometown, and your journey starts with traveling to Lighthaven to assist with repelling a demon invasion. Along the way you acquire spells, equipment, and subweapons to help you traverse the maps and slay demons before reaching a signature boss for each chapter area. Despite the focus on linear progression, it gets its metroidvania elements right, with backtracking to complete maps, uncover new bosses, and finish acquiring gear and spells later on after you arrive at Lighthaven. Jrago has its own cautious and intense style of gameplay that doesn't quite fit into the mold of a typical action RPG. It may seem unusually punishing at first with virtually relentless enemy waves, but once you give it time, and adapt to the challenge it presents you, it comes together splendidly. Enemies are absolutely vast, and their attacks can stack without interruption, meaning if you act careless and get cornered, they can pile up and absolutely destroy you. It's both hilarious and intimidating seeing how many enemies can appear on your screen at once, but they are in fact limited in quantity, and only reappear after reaching a sanctuary (save room). Your best efforts are served by discreetly pushing forward, utilizing quick movement, deliberate positioning, and rapid spell and subweapon casting to trim enemy numbers, leveling up until you're sufficiently strong to defeat them with few hits and minimal damage, and then overtaking the stage boss. There's a cathartic pleasure in mowing down vast hordes of demons with a relentless assault of spears, tomahawks, tornadoes, and melee strikes using tactical movement and positioning. Likewise, the bosses fall this way, with a platforming arena you navigate to unleash a healthbar-incinerating bombardment on them. As you gain power, the violence you dispense is just absolutely relentless. Toward the end of the game, this involves a bit of menu management to quickly switch spells, but it doesn't take time to navigate the menus or load them, so the gameplay is hardly affected. The enemies themselves are delightful in death, often screaming, splattering, or falling apart as you strike them down, and the major demons and bosses curse you with a guttural "DEMON SLAYER...!" once they're destroyed. It really drives home the feeling of being a righteous demon slayer as you get more powerful and accustomed to the game mechanics. Speaking of feeling like a DEMON SLAYER, the game is driven by a strong and brooding instrumental Doom/Thrash Metal soundtrack composed by the game dev himself. This is easily a highlight of the game, especially when you can find individual tracks from the OST throughout the world along with their art covers. Complimenting this are eloquently written verses that build a Christian theme for the demon occupation and tragedy that befell the world. As I mentioned before, the game utilizes a lot of premade assets, and they coalesce into a vivid and unique appearance that is quite unlike anything I've seen. The author took time to carefully arrange the visuals with aesthetic consideration, layering graphics and backgrounds to creature an impressive, almost psychedelic, gothic landscape. it doesn't come across as being cheap or effortless whatsoever. Honestly, if you can handle the gruesome charm of something like Cruelty Squad, you can easily see the somber beauty in Jrago's form. You can clearly tell the developer played through his game and put careful consideration into progression. There's no wasted features, or errant design. Everything is paced properly, and all equipment and spells are given the proper time and usefulness to be utilized. There's a satisfying power curve that ramps and stays coherent all the way to the end, and the stage design builds to satisfying difficulty, with a few timeless nods to Castlevania. Jrago The Demon Hunter is an incredible effort from a first time developer. To put it simply, Jrago is metal. It embraces the full sincerity of the aesthetic, and none of the ironic trappings of the modern era of pop culture. The game is fully recommended to Action RPG fans, metal heads, or just fans of obscure indie games that deserve more attention. Something to note: The game is fully compatible with the Steam Deck, and offers a in-game visual guide to controls. The developer also provided a comprehensive list of guides on the Community Hub, along with a complete video longplay.

The graphics are consistently inconsistent, the controls have some unique "qualities" to them, and the level design is borderline unfair... and yet the fantastic music compells me to continue playing. Once you learn the game's quirks and assume that every enemy can kill you because of it, it's a decently enjoyable game, though I'm playing it mostly because I want to hear all the terrible voice acting. You could say it's a metroidvania, but I think it's a little too linear for that. There's some out-of-the-way things to collect like optional gear and weapons, but don't expect reverse-boss-order levels of freedom in this game. The best parts of this game would probably be: 1. The music, all original metal-style music, fits the theme and gets you hooked despite the game's flaws. 2. The UI. Weirdly enough the UI works well, you can swap gear very quickly despite having to open a screen-wide menu. 3. It hasn't crashed yet. 4. Somehow everything has voice-acting. Most of it is terrible, but that only adds to the game's chaotic atmosphere. 5. There's so many enemies, you often can't take a single step without having to whack something that's in your way. The worst parts: 1. The level design is atrocious. Assume the worst outcome at all times and you'll be fine, mostly. You will still die numerous times to unfair enemy placement and death pits. 2. Enemies have little to no telegraphs so you have to guess how much time an enemy takes to attack again. 3. It's very hard to tell if you will get hit by an attack or not because the hitboxes oftentimes don't match the sprites of anything, especially bosses that use melee attacks. 4. There's some funny glitches with the physics you can abuse to get some items earlier than intended. On the flipside you will occasionally get stuck on the terrain or in walls, which might get you killed. This happens to enemies too. 5. It's hard to overlook the mismatched graphics, but for me that's more of a positive.

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. [hr][/hr] 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.

This game has a real 90's feel to it. It's like I'm playing a new SNES or Playstation game. Music and sound design are excellent. It has all the good metroidvania elements: Level Design, Exploration and Mapping system, Secret areas etc. Wide variety of enemies, weapons, spells, and collectibles. Good progression system that makes you want to get 100% of everything.

Brings nostagic feelings of the past, Has rich audio and sound effects, Also, You have voiceovers on every character. Just remember to navigate with space key in menus.

This game is hard, old school hard. Start on easy, take your time and explore. This game is full nostalgia of games of the past, hard and brutal. Was able to get to Act 5 so far, reached out to the dev on some issues I had, they responded promptly with bug fixes. I haven't even mentioned the music, the music in this game is beyond fantastic, 11 out of 10. For this being the devs first game man it's been a trip down memory lane for games of old school past. Do you self a favor and play this game with a controller, the way it was meant to be played. I ended up playing on a steam deck hooked to my TV with a PS5 controller. The game is soooo much more enjoyable with that setup. The graphics could use some work but after a chat with the dev and realizing this is a one man shop with passion for creating old school games, I can look past those things. It's not a super long game for those that aren't going 100% complete it. Overall I'd give the game an 6 out of 10. The soundtrack alone is worth the price of admission.

Good game i like the hard core style of it kinda reminds me of some really fun games i've played in the past so great game keep up good work

good lil metroidvania/monster hunter game plus it's a local game. highly recommend for any 2d game lovers.

Being a fan of the late NES Castlevania games (with a bit of Metroid as well), this took me back to when I would stare at a small 13" TV screen and play till all hours of the night. I am liking the story and the soundtrack to this game, can't wait to get more free time to finish this.