"Hell Maiden" Demo Review
Yes this is a review of a demo as of the time of this post the full game hasn't come out yet. Just hear me out.
So Hell Maiden is a game that re-imagines the story of the Divine Comedy where after Dante ascends to Heaven to reunite with his beloved, He finds himself back in hell again with no memories. Virgil finds him again asking what happened to have made Dante fall out heaven but Dante has no memories and no answers. Mind you all the characters just mentioned are drawn as cute anime girls. No idea way, that just seems to be the artistic vision of the developers and they just really really like cute anime girls.
But I'm not here to talk about the art work, that's tangential to the real meat and potatoes which is the gameplay and God-tier intersection between 1 v 100 time based survival gameplay combined with rogue-like deck building. See the buffs and nerfs rewarded each round are not just the usual "Expand attack range", "Boost speed", "+20 critical weapon with -30 health" but the manner in which you arrange these changes in the style of a 3 x 3 set slots is where the real fun begins. Say you want to max out your attack into something both long range and continuous so you can focus on collecting XP points and health to really last as long as you can. The ideal way would be to get a "range expansion" card stacked on top of a "flame thrower" and "Magic Projectile weapon" in the first slot. Thereby applying the expanded range to both the fire and magic ranged weapon. This mix and match approach applies to all other benefits so if you mistakenly stack a weapon on top of a "Expanded range" perk, that perk won't apply to the weapon that's on top of it. There's a deliberate direction in the way perks are applied and multiplied that you have to be cognizant of in order to reap the most rewards out of this system. The peak experience with this game in my opinion is when you're overwhelmed by mobs of enemies or the over-bearing boss and upon reflection you start thinking of new configurations to amplify different play styles. As maybe a self healing card combined with increased speed and front facing sword attack would give better results than circle strafing the mobs with ranged fire and magic attacks with increased ranges.
Seriously if you have a steam account and 30 minutes to kill, try this demo it's so much fun: Hell Maiden Demo on Steam