Back in June 2021, during the Devolver Max Pass + Showcase, Devolver Digital and developer Doinksoft (Gato Roboto, Devolver Bootleg) announced a top-down, retro-inspired, run and gun shooter by the name of Demon Throttle. Artistically inspired by games released on the Nintendo Entertainment System, Demon Throttle combines hectic bullet hell action with light RPG mechanics to create a tight adrenaline-fueled romp with an interesting sense of humor.
Possibly the most interesting aspect about Demon Throttle is the fact that it only exists as a physical video game cartridge on the Nintendo Switch. Produced in partnership with Special Reserve Games, Demon Throttle was rather humorously advertised as a game that was only going to be released physically and would never be made available on any digital storefront or subscription service. In 2022, this type of release decision is frankly unheard of, immediately separating Demon Throttle from other games available on the market. Game collecting in recent years has seen massive spikes in not only interest from the general gaming public, but also spikes in individual game prices on the second-hand market. As of the writing of this review, Demon Throttle is sold out on the Special Reserve Games website, so, if after reading this review you are interested in giving the game a shot, it’s time to go scout your local video game store or hope that scalpers haven’t jacked up the price online.
Seeing as the game is a physical-only release, I suppose it’s only right that part of this review highlights the physical packaging of the game. I pre-ordered the “Switch Single” version of the game which included a sequentially numbered game case (mine is number 4101 out of 10000) with a double-sided reversible cover art sleeve, two sheets of stickers featuring a number of characters and enemies from the game, a full-color instruction manual, as well as the game on a Nintendo Switch cartridge. This version of the game was $29.99 USD, and there was also a “Switch Reserve” version available for $39.99 USD that included a premium Special Reserve box and alternative cover art in addition to the features listed above. The stickers are high quality and colorful, as is the cover art for the game itself which in a way pays homage to video games of the NES era by depicting hand-drawn characters and enemies that don’t quite resemble their sprite art counterparts found in the actual game.
However, the instruction manual should receive special praise. First of all, people who have played games for more than a decade may remember a time when video games bought from a store included game manuals in the box. Little booklets that contained screenshots, item or character descriptions, tips on how to play the game, and/or background lore that was never explained in the game itself. It’s a practice that has all but disappeared in the modern video game era with the only exception being these smaller physical release-oriented companies like Special Reserve Games that go out of their way to include instruction manuals for every release. The manual included with Demon Throttle is fun to flip through on its own. The manual is small enough to fit snugly inside the switch case, is printed in full color on high-quality paper, and features many of the things I listed above like character backgrounds, helpful gameplay tips, and even a cheat code hidden behind a pressure-activated sticker. They really went all out with the manual and it ended up being a helpful tool that I referenced multiple times while playing the game.
Demon Throttle is light on story as you would expect from a game taking inspiration from retro NES titles. As the story goes, you play as both a Vampire and a Gunslinger that have each been wronged by a powerful demon. The Vampire, who was once a woman, was cursed long ago with an affliction that, you guessed it, turned her into a vampire. After collecting four magic chalices needed to perform a ritual to cure the affliction, the chalices are stolen by a group of demons. The Gunslinger, sprung awake by some sensual moans and groans, discovers his own wife having an affair with the big Demon King. Both characters embark on a quest for personal revenge against the forces of evil. And that’s about it when it comes to story setup. The game features an opening cutscene, some brief dialogue exchanges with boss characters, and an ending cutscene. Story isn’t the main focus of the game, but what’s there is sufficient enough to build an attachment to the characters you play as throughout the game as well as sufficient reason for disliking the evil Demon King.
Time to get to the actual video game. As I mentioned in the intro, Demon Throttle is a top-down bullet hell shooter with light RPG mechanics. The game features four main levels, each with a hidden subterranean section that is important for game progression (more on that in a bit). When you start, the level begins scrolling downwards as you move forwards blasting away all enemies in your path. Killing demons rewards experience which levels up each character. Chunks of the terrain can also be blasted away to reveal item pickups, stat points, and secret paths to those subterranean areas. These secret underground areas are filled with monsters and ghosts aplenty and end in a mini-boss encounter that, once taken down, will reward you with one of The Vampire’s magic chalices. As you progress through the main level, you need to be mindful of all manner of hazards. Enemies rushing towards you, bullets raining down from all sides, and even the environment can pinch you between an unbreakable wall and the scrolling screen if you are not careful (if you time your jump correctly, you can actually use this to your advantage to reach new areas and escape damage). Eventually, you will arrive at the end of the level where you will encounter a boss that needs taking out. After you vanquish the demon general in your path, you will move on to the next level, bringing you one step closer to taking on the Demon King and exacting your revenge.
Demon Throttle supports single-player or local 2-player co-op. Seeing as I had no one to join me in jolly cooperation, I played the game in single-player. Even when playing solo, you still control both The Vampire and The Gunslinger, albeit not at the same time. Each character has their own unique weapon, their own level progression, and their own health and items. You switch between the characters with the push of a button when playing in single player, and both players are controlled on screen at the same time while in local co-op. The Gunslinger’s weapon shoots a burst of consecutive shots in a line while The Vampire’s weapon shoots a single arrow followed by a 3-arrow spread shot. Each character also has a throwable bomb item; The Gunslinger can throw dynamite that deals good damage or can clear away a large chunk of terrain, while The Vampire can send out magical homing arrows that follow the nearest enemy. You need to strategize in the moment, using each character’s weapons to meet incoming threats in the most efficient way. As the manual describes, The Gunslinger is great at taking out enemies that are quickly approaching while The Vampire deals a ton of damage up close.
I mentioned the game features a leveling system and stat points, but don’t become immediately overwhelmed because it’s a pretty simple system. Each character levels up from level 1 to level 5. Each level up will increase that character’s base damage, and at levels 3 and 5 that character’s firing pattern will be upgraded. For example, at level 3 The Gunslinger will fire six bullets instead of the initial four, and The Vampire gets an extra arrow added to both shots of her attack. Hidden in breakable terrain blocks throughout the level are stat points that, when picked up by a character, improve one of three stats; Speed, Tempo, or Luck. Speed increases the character’s movement speed (how quick they move across the screen), Tempo improves their rate of fire (how fast shots will be fired), and Luck influences things like critical hits, chances that an enemy projectile will miss, or if a throwable bomb will be used without reducing your total supply. You want to constantly be swapping characters while you play not only so they can effectively match incoming threats, but so they both collect XP by killing demons and can level up enough by the time you reach the final level. You could just play one character and level them up fully early on, but that might end up hurting you later in the harder levels where you may have to fall back on the weaker of the two characters as a backup. Following some of the helpful tips in the instruction manual are again important and helpful early on in the game for understanding how to properly build up your characters and get stat points that suit each character’s specific playstyle.
I should also mention that this leveling system isn’t permanent and the reason for that ties into the game’s overall progression. Once you reach the Demon King’s castle, fight your way through the hordes of enemies and fell the King himself, if you haven’t collected each of The Vampire’s four magic chalices throughout your current playthrough, the Demon King will reveal that attempting to fight him without the chalices is futile and will then go back in time, starting your quest over from the beginning. In order to get the true ending of the game, you will need to collect each of the four magic chalices found by taking out the mini-bosses hidden in the underground sections of each of the four main levels in a single run. This is made a bit harder because the entrances of underground areas can appear in different spots of each level, and because the levels are constantly scrolling, it becomes a very real possibility that if you aren’t thorough in your search, you may miss the entrance to the underground area for the level you are playing. Additionally, if you should die at any point of a specific playthrough with both characters, the run will end and you will be sent back to the beginning.
The game is, in a way, designed around this pseudo-time loop. Once you complete the game or complete various special criteria like killing certain enemies or replaying levels a few times, the game unlocks new content that expands the gameplay in interesting ways. The core gameplay loop of exploring, shooting, and dodging incoming enemies remains largely unchanged but through playing the game, eventually, enemies will be given coins that will drop upon death. Currency wasn’t a mechanic before but now, when you transition between levels, you will discover a shopkeeper that you can spend your money with who will sell you items like a revive for a character when they die or magic projectiles that will pierce through enemies. After another playthrough, I unlocked a bestiary, which in other games usually simply collects info about different creatures. In this game, initially, the bestiary is empty and as you play now, certain enemies will drop a hunk of meat when killed. If you pick up this meat and finish the level, it will trigger a lite turn-based JRPG-type battle with a random enemy. You can dodge or attack each turn, and if you successfully defeat the enemy, their information gets added to the bestiary. Beyond that, harder golden versions of those enemies will appear while playing that reward more XP when taken out. There are a number of new gameplay mechanics, game modifiers that change the enemies or levels in interesting ways, as well as new features like the bestiary, a sound test mode, and new backgrounds that are unlocked by playing the game multiple times. While unlocking these new features is exciting, the criteria for unlocking them is not clearly communicated in the game, which can be annoying when you play through a run trying new tactics in an attempt to unlock new features and you don’t unlock anything, only to play again and randomly unlock something on the next run. The mystery behind unlocking these new features could be implemented as another sort of homage to the oblique nature many retro video games had, but at the end of the day, a little more clarity in that regard would have been appreciated.
Speaking of homage, the visuals and sound design in Demon Throttle are delightful. The 8-bit chiptune music is layered and complex and honestly feels astonishingly of the era. It’s energetic and lively during the action and moody and sinister during cutscenes. One of my favorite aspects is during the cutscenes where some of the dialogue is actually voiced, but it’s filtered and muffled so heavily that it sounds as though the voices are coming out of incredibly old and static-filled speakers. The cutscenes are drawn with incredible visual detail and displayed in limited colors that again lend to an incredibly authentic-looking image. It’s almost like looking at an old arcade screen. There has got to be some special blending that occurs with those specific limited colors that give it that entrancing effect. The way the font is designed for the title card or when “Demon General Vanquished” appears on screen after defeating a boss is one aspect I particularly enjoyed. From the opening marshes to the snow-filled mountain stage to the sandy desert, each environment and the enemies found within have enough visual complexity that they feel substantial while still looking fairly simple on the surface. The overall visual aesthetic of the game is strong and it definitely creates its own identity while borrowing and applying elements of other retro games into its design language.
Demon Throttle also has a surprising sense of humor. The now iconic line from the game’s reveal trailer where The Gunslinger says in a low-quality static voice, “That Demon Kissed My Wife… Or Something!” was funny at the time but seemed like it easily could have been a one-off voice line specifically made for a trailer. But the game subverts expectations in ways that made me chuckle and, in one instance during the final boss, I actually laughed out loud because I was so caught off guard. I don’t remember the last time that has happened to me while playing a game. I know I’m talking in pretty vague terms to avoid spoilers, but just know that the game offers some pretty good laughs in unexpected ways.
At times the game can feel like a rogue-lite game in regard to how you play through it multiple times with certain things changing on each run, but in execution, the random variance isn’t as severe as other games like Hades or Rogue Legacy. In fact, while the game does unlock new gameplay mechanics and features, as I described above, the core gameplay loop doesn’t evolve much from run to run. As a result, the game can start to feel a bit repetitive in those later runs as you hone your skills enough to find and collect each magic chalice on your way to the Demon King. Even the bosses and mini-bosses in the levels never change, they never get new dialogue or new attack phases on each playthrough. Bosses that initially have a funny joke. like the boss of world 3, eventually lose the humor, and you as the player just end up skipping the dialogue in order to get through the fight and move on. Compounding this feeling is what I alluded to above about missing the entrance to an underground area in a level. Seeing as you need to collect the chalices in every level and there is no way to go back if you miss one, it becomes very frustrating when you have to restart a run because you missed your opportunity to go for a chalice or when a random game modifier completely changes how enemies behave or how the environment changes (example, the level becoming dark or you starting a level with 1 HP). Many times in the late stages of playing the game, if you are going for the true ending, it’s in the best interest of your time to quit out of the game and restart. Unlocking new features or experiencing new modifiers by completing runs is initially fun and exciting, but, eventually, the new features start to unlock less and less and by that point you don’t want to bother completing a run, you just want to reach the end.
I guess now is as good a spot as any to discuss Demon Throttle’s difficulty. Living up to its retro inspirations, Demon Throttle can, at times, be fairly difficult, especially when you are first starting out and still coming to grips with how to play the game. As with other bullet hell games, the amount of projectiles on screen can be overwhelming, sometimes one error can have a domino effect that results in a quick failure. But while the game can be difficult, it isn’t insurmountable. Even during my first play session with the game, I could feel my skills improving as well as the feeling that I was getting better. If you feel like you are hitting a brick wall at the start, reference the manual and find that handy cheat code. In a similar vain to the historic “Konami Code” made famous by games like Contra, the appropriately named “Doinksoft Code” gives you helpful improvements like starting with the maximum amount of throwable bombs and a revive item, as well as your health bar and items resetting on your characters at the beginning of each level. It doesn’t make your characters invincible and you still need to go through the process of leveling them up, but it’s certainly a helpful tool that can help you learn the game, and if you want a challenge, you can try again without the benefits of the cheat code. Demon Throttle also features a hard difficulty mode, which restricts some more open pathways in levels as well as including more late-game enemies much earlier on in a given run. And while I didn’t end up playing the local 2-player mode, having a second active player might be helpful in meeting the game’s difficulty head on, but could also end up being a hindrance due to the game effectively doubling the number of things on screen that players need to keep track of. Overall the difficulty is tough but manageable and feels well balanced during each level.
Demon Throttle isn’t a very long game, but that isn’t really an issue. The game is designed to be replayable and there is definitely enough there to give you a few hours of enjoyment and even more if you plan to unlock everything and fill out the bestiary. I had a couple of play sessions with the game that lasted a little more than an hour each. Seeing as the Nintendo Switch doesn’t have a great playtime tracking method, I would guess my final playtime after getting the true ending was somewhere in the 5-6 hour mark. But the most important thing is that the game doesn’t overstay its welcome. Too many games have a habit of letting the runtime run away and it absolutely kills the pacing and enjoyment of games big and small alike. While you won’t be playing Demon Throttle endlessly, it’s a fun arcade-style shooter that has just enough depth and just enough content to be an enjoyable little retreat if you are looking for something to scratch a retro itch.
If you are able to get your hands on a physical copy, Demon Throttle is a fun time. It can be challenging like the retro games it looked to for inspiration and some aspects of its design can be repetitive or annoying, but the visual design, music, humor, and gameplay pull together to rise above its weaker parts. And if nothing else, the fact that it is a game released in 2022 on a real cartridge, in a physical box, with a paper instruction manual is just really neat. Even if it is just a reminder of a part of gaming history that we probably won’t return to in a big way ever again.
