Arguably, the biggest problem with Shadows of the Damned back when it was originally released in 2011 was its profound unseriousness—when gray-brown, war-torn, and taciturn were the de rigueur trends in gaming. It probably didn’t help that the game was still a far cry from whatever high-level terror was originally planned by co-creator Mikami Shinji (much of which wound up in the Evil Within games later down the road). But resuscitating this deeply unserious third-person horror shooter in 2024, when big and obnoxiously self-serious games are absolutely dooming studios, feels like the most wonderful breath of fresh air.
Shadows of the Damned is, in a nutshell, a dumber and weirder version of Resident Evil 4—and that’s said with nothing but love. There isn’t anything particularly poignant about booze-swilling badass Garcia Hotspur’s quest to save his lingerie-loving girlfriend Paula from the clutches of the big-headed demon Fleming. And there absolutely doesn’t have to be, provided that the gunplay still feels as cathartic as ever (it does), and the cast of oddities escorting the foul-mouthed Garcia through perdition manages to be good company (they very much are).
There’s still plenty of personality to the game’s visuals, which draw on the more gothic parts of Resident Evil, the comic timing of Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, and the winking creepiness of Edward Gorey paintings. But the X factor remains Suda51’s Troma-esque grindhouse sensibilities, having never met an eldritch demon that he couldn’t design with a redneck accent before making the accursed thing take down his loincloth and piss on an arcane relic.
It says everything that Shadows of the Damned’s voice of reason is Garcia’s sidekick, Johnson, a disembodied floating skull that sounds freakishly similar to John Oliver and can transform into a torch, a motorcycle, or a series of guns. The game’s gunplay is copy-pasted from the Resident Evil series, though it’s faster and looser, and boasts a couple of small supernatural tweaks. In contrast to his spiritual predecessors in the S.T.A.R.S. task force, Garcia spends Shadows of the Damned pounding back booze instead of herbs, and will frequently and pointedly bitch about having to do yet another puzzle. It’s juvenile ridiculousness for its own sake, and even as things get a wee bit repetitive in the game’s later hours, that gleeful, sick sense of play goes a long way toward making one wonder what weirdness awaits around the next corner.
It’s with all that in mind that it’s fairly easy to forgive just how little has been done to bring Shadows of the Damned up to code in 2024. Especially by contrast to the botched remaster of Suda51’s Lollipop Chainsaw, it’s almost a relief that the worst that can be said for this release is that it’s indistinguishable from the original, aside from a mild spitshine of the textures and it running at 4K60. Without trying to run an expensive graphical arms race, Shadows of the Damned is forced to stand on charm. Given just how many unique experiences exist outside the AAA bubble right now, the fact that Garcia Hotspur’s wild profane trash-sploitation adventure still does is a timely reminder of what can happen in the arena of AA games.
This game was reviewed with a code provided by Tara Bruno PR.
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