When you buy a Suda 51 game, you should know what you’re getting into. The famous game director is known for wild ideas, unique creations and immature jokes. They are not to everyone’s taste, which is represented by the mixed reviews. But if Suda 51 has a fan, it’s me; the person who still counts kawaii fever dream Lollipop Chainsaw as one of their favorite games of all time.

The original Shadows of the Damned was released in 2011 and was the second collaboration between Suda 51 and the legendary Shinji Mikami. The pair have previously taken the world by storm with the cult classic killer 7, and feel like the perfect duo to develop a idiosyncratic movement through hell. Shadows of the Damned is a 13-year-old game, and it makes sense that certain aspects have aged poorly, making it the perfect target for a remaster.

Shadows of the Damned tells the story of Garcia Hotspur, a demon hunter who travels to hell to retrieve his girlfriend Paula from the demon king, Fleming. The story is simple but it’s just a tool to deliver the writing and fast paced gameplay. This spring Suda 51 and Shinji Mikami interviewSuda explains that the game feels fast and intuitive compared to modern games that focus on looks, resolution and high-quality graphics, and we have to agree.

Garcia has access to three different types of weapons, and each of them has its own use cases. While you’ll often switch up on the fly, you’ll also have to deal with hordes of demons relentlessly coming at you. It’s hard to line up a headshot when so many are coming at you at once, but their bodies absorb bullets like mushrooms. Fights are tense and stressful. I played on the easiest difficulty, and early demons could kill me in two hits. There are also very of enemies, and mowing them down forms the bulk of the game.

When I first played I thought Garcia was meant to be a drunk person, but then I realized that gyroscopic controls are on by default in the sparse options menu under “Motion Controls”. However, turning them off wasn’t an option as moving the analog stick is just too slow for the fast pace of gameplay, even at the highest sensitivity setting. I struggled a lot with balancing the camera and gyro controls, especially when you have to switch weapons and fend off large numbers of enemies.

Suda says the final draft of Shadows was the sixth attempt at the script after input from the publisher EAand it feels like the development may have been strained. Suda 51 has a lot of unique and interesting ideas, but then you see them reused several times, like kaiju style fights with the massive gun or paper crafting levels. While these would have been interesting as a one-off, they become banal by the third time. Garcia also has limited banter, and while I love a good joke about a swamped male talent as much as the next funny girl, it started to crack by the hundredth time I heard it.

Another aspect that feels rushed is the interesting antagonist you see in the first chapter of the game. You receive her backstory and see her multiple times, only for her boss fight to be reduced to a papercraft level that leads to a lackluster ending. Had the paper boss fight been followed by a traditional 3D fight, we would have felt a more satisfying end to her arc. The level design is also pretty basic, and it feels like bullet sponge enemies and relentless hordes are there to cover up the minimal run time.

The biggest disappointment with the remaster is how many opportunities were missed. The hitboxes are oddly small, and you often see your bullets shoot right through enemies you’re sure to hit. Even though weak points are shown on enemies in bright red, it still feels uncertain where to aim. There are also no manual save points, which is annoying when the autosave sometimes doesn’t work. I would boot up the game in the morning only to find that I had been sent back to a previous checkpoint.

Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered’s biggest sin is unskippable cutscenes. Going back to a checkpoint and then being faced with three unskippable cutscenes in a row just feels bad. There’s no excuse for not allowing players to skip cutscenes in 2024, other than to fill out the game, and it was honestly one of the biggest sources of frustration. Another gaming sin is the instant kills that are everywhere, and most modern players refuse to deal with them.

Shadows of the Damned was developed under restrictions, and Suda 51’s unique ideas were reused, giving them no time to shine. The remaster was the perfect opportunity to add quality of life changes, remove repetitive parts and add new sections. The difficulty settings also don’t seem to reduce the number of bullets each enemy needs to take out, leading to further repetition in the game. I love Suda 51’s work and really wanted to love this remaster, but it just misses the mark in so many ways.

Score: 5/10

Version tested: PS5