Demoniaca: Everlasting Night

I have a soft spot for small indie projects that swing way above their weight class, and Demoniaca: Everlasting Night swings harder than almost anything I have seen from a tiny team in years. What it pitches is genuinely singular: a Metroidvania set inside the Tower of Babel, where the combat system is lifted wholesale from classic 2D fighters. Light punch, heavy punch, light kick, heavy kick mapped to the face buttons, with motion-input specials pulled straight from the King of Fighters playbook. The developer even coined a term for it: Kofvania. That word alone should tell you whether you are the target audience. The presentation is where Demoniaca earns real goodwill. The pixel art portraits are detailed and expressive, the sprite work on the protagonist is genuinely beautiful to watch in motion, and the rock and metal soundtrack carries a raw, unapologetic energy that suits the gothic bloodbath tone better than any orchestral score could. A sinister red-and-black colour palette drips throughout every corridor, and the Tower of Babel itself is populated with a cast of eccentric NPCs, from the goofy merchant Boxman who teaches new moves from a tower library, to a blue-haired taunt machine named Klin. The world has personality in the margins, and that counts for a lot. The problems are real and they start early. The wall-jump mechanic is genuinely unreliable, handing control back to you at unpredictable angles when exploration demands precision. There is no auto-save, so a bad room transition can cost you a meaningful stretch of progress. Fast travel is locked behind consumable Teleportation Scrolls rather than any permanent warp system, which turns backtracking into a slow grind through already-cleared corridors. The map only displays the Tower's outline and section connections, offering little guidance on which rooms hold what. Enemies do not telegraph their difficulty visually either, and palette-swapped variants can suddenly apply poison, petrify, or confusion stacks that feel arbitrary rather than designed. A damage threshold system means basic attacks are frequently flagged as ineffective, forcing you into specific combos or DP-burning special moves, but the combo list is large, slow to activate, and lacks clear visual differentiation between moves. You will spend the opening hours dying in ways that feel unfair before the RPG systems, stat allocation between ATK, DEF, INT, and luck, and gear loadouts start pulling the difficulty into a manageable shape. Local co-op via a summoned Devilboy companion is a genuinely thoughtful addition. A second player can hop in and control him, adding firepower that meaningfully softens the punishing difficulty without removing the challenge entirely. It is one of those features that feels like it came from someone who actually plays games with people. The boss encounters, imperfect as they are, at least feel like the game trying hardest: screen-filling effects, striking designs, and moments where the fighting-game roots actually land with a satisfying snap. The soulslink mechanic, which escalates the soundtrack intensity as you power up, is a small atmospheric touch that I found myself working toward just for the auditory reward. This is a game that needed another full pass at its control scheme and traversal design. The ambition is not in question. But recommendation comes with a clear caveat: if your tolerance for rough-edged indie work runs out in the first hour, you will not reach the parts worth staying for. If you are the kind of player who reads a game generously, who can hear what a developer was reaching for even when the execution falls short, Demoniaca offers something you genuinely cannot find anywhere else in the genre.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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