Game Reviews

Demons’ Land

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Demons’ Land
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| Demons' Land

In video games, we’re used to averting apocalypses or surviving in their aftermath, but causing the end of the world is a burden we’re not used to shouldering.

Demons’ Land hinges on the fact that you’ve brought about armageddon, turned the world to ash, and let loose a plague of blood-crazed monsters.

While cribbed from I Am Legend, it’s still a cracking setup for a horror-adventure title that’s disappointingly wasted on a series of tedious locked room puzzles - all curiously lacking in excitement, terror, or even ‘demons’.

Tomb raider

After an atmospheric prologue, featuring a slow pan across a ruined city and text narration explaining that you’re responsible for the death of civilisation as we know it, you’re whisked back two years to a fixed view of a cluttered wooden desk and tasked with answering a phone using the game's simple, interactive item-tapping controls.

A lady then tells you to fly to Tibet and steal an artefact from a temple (you’re a thief, apparently, but this isn’t really explained) and so you zip half way across the globe.

It’s here that the first niggling doubts about Demons’ Land kick in, as you’re faced with a dangerously basic puzzle that involves rotating symbols on pillars to match those on a scrap of paper.

Fortunately, the story then kicks in to snap you out of the doldrums. The handover of the artefact goes south and, after your car is pushed into a lake (with you inside), you decide to chase the people responsible through a series of disappointingly gentle escapades involving locked doors and the acquisition of slightly different keys.

Hidden objective

While the promise of the apocalyptic first scene keeps you tapping objects on the detailed, yet mainly static, scenery in the hope that something exciting will happen, nothing really does for the remaining hour or so of gameplay.

There’s little sense of pacing, either, as you’ll stroll through the majority of the game doing barely more than backtracking a screen to scavenge for the one item that will unlock the next scene.

Then, just when your brain starts shutting down, Demons’ Land hits you with a complex multi-room series of interconnected, mostly illogical puzzles that still feel completely arbitrary (starting a fire to power a miniature submarine to collect a record player needle is a typically oblique challenge).

The cliffhanger climax almost makes up for the busywork of the weak point-and-tap adventuring, but it’s really just the setup for a series that might coast by on a competently told tale but barely qualifies as a game.

Demons’ Land

Approximately one tenth as exciting as its name implies, Demons’ Land might have a nightmarish premise, but its uninspired locked puzzle gameplay is just deathly dull
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Paul Devlin
Paul Devlin
A newspaper reporter turned games journo, Paul's first ever console was an original white Game Boy (still in working order, albeit with a yellowing tinge and 30 second battery life). Now he writes about Android with a style positively dripping in Honeycomb, stuffed with Gingerbread and coated with Froyo