Re-release this: Shadows of the Damned
Re-release this: Shadows of the Damned
Suda's and Mikami's joint production is about love, loss, and also dick jokes. Well, OK. Lots of dick jokes.
This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Shadows of the Damned isn’t a perfect game by any means, but for a number of reasons it was impossible for it to live up to the expectations surrounding the idea of its existence, anyway. First, there was the fact that it was the second game being made through a partnership between a pair of beloved developers in Goichi Suda (director, writer of No More Heroes, The Silver Case, Twilight Syndrome) and Shinji Mikami (director of Resident Evil, Resident Evil 4, God Hand, Vanquish), with the first being Killer7, a real classic of a game. Killer7 was very much not a game for everyone, but it was the kind that generates thinkpieces simply for existing, one that got everyone who played it thinking about what games mean and how they should play and what they are capable of: that kind of conversation-generation is difficult to replicate, and even more so when the publisher of the new game is the cartoonishly corporate Electronic Arts.
Second, and it’s tied into that last bit, is that Suda didn’t actually get to make the game he wanted to make. Shadows of the Damned is a fine experience as is, but when you hear about what Suda was planning to do — something more exploratory, based on Franz Kafka’s posthumously published final novel The Castle, with interactions between not just the torch-wielding protagonist and foes, but potential hostile interactions between said protagonist and the villagers around the castle, as well — I kind of wish I had gotten the chance to play that instead. Shadows of the Damned is, again, a good time, but it’s also the fifth version of the game that Suda had pitched to EA, and something tells me we might all have enjoyed one of the earlier versions even better when you consider Suda’s taste vs. EA’s.
Suda himself is the source of that five versions bit:
“Shadows Of The Damned was going to be a very different game than the one that came out,” he laments. “That game went through about five different versions, as we got closer to a game that EAP could accept. For example, originally when Garcia [Hotspur] took out his gun and looked through the laser sight, it was ringed with flowers. And then around the circle of flowers were little leaping bunnies. It was very cute, but the EAP team was like, ‘What on Earth is this?’ Those meetings felt like court interrogations.”
And Mikami had no trouble speaking up for Suda in later interviews on the subject, either:
Did Shadows Of The Damned, your collaboration with Suda51, turn out as you'd initially intended?
No, it became a completely different game. That was a bit disappointing. I think Suda was unable to create the scenario he'd originally had in his head,and he rewrote the scenario several times. I think his heart was broken. He's such a unique creator, so it seems to me that he was not quite comfortable with making this game.
It did get good reviews in the end.
Yes, pretty good, but it's not a case of whether it was good or bad. The game was nothing like Suda had planned, which is rather sad. Mind you, if we'd made it as he originally planned, it probably would have sold even less, but it would have been very unique.
Suda does not strike me as the type to put sales potential at the top of the list for reasons to make a game. EA, of course, would. Suda almost completely moved off of working with major publishers after this — Lollipop Chainsaw would release the next year, in 2012, so he was kind of tied to Warner Bros there already, but unlike with the EA deal, they were only the North American publishers, and not worldwide with total control.
All of that being said, the Shadows of the Damned we did get is still fun and memorable, because it manages to be an action-oriented love story about loss featuring a man who isn’t afraid to be in touch with his emotions who also isn’t a Video Game Dad, and will also whip out a gun named Johnson and press it against the temple of a demon before pulling the trigger when the moment calls for it.
Well, the gun itself isn’t named Johnson. That’s the name of the (former) demon who has partnered with the protagonist and demon hunter, Garcia Hotspur, who can transform into a gun. And a torch, and a motorcycle, and actually it’s not just one gun, but a bunch of different kinds of guns you’ll unlock as you play. That first gun, though, is named Boner. Yes. Johnson’s Boner. Because the demon, Johnson, is a skull, but also the gun (guns in general?) is kind of like a penis. It’s all very subtle, as you can tell, especially when someone says the word “penetration.”
Shadows of the Damned is a love story wrapped in dick jokes, which is how Shakespeare would have wanted things to be. You could argue that there are too many dick jokes, even, with cringe-worthy cracks occurring in the game’s first hour alone due to both volume and the winking awfulness of the innuendo, but the game is relentless enough in its phallic preoccupation that it comes around to being funny again. If you’re willing to be in on the joke, then it can be an enjoyable one, but I wouldn’t suggest you design a drinking game around it all lest you die of alcohol poisoning.
If you can get into/get past the plethora of Son of the Beach-level penis punning, then you’ll be able to experience a game that’s probably most easily described as Suda creating the characters for a Resident Evil 4-style shooter. Whereas Killer7 had more of a blending of Suda and Mikami into one delicious and colorful video game smoothie, you can pretty easily pinpoint what in Shadows of the Damned is Suda and what is Mikami. That’s not a negative or anything, it’s just the video game equivalent of Audioslave’s first album. If you have any familiarity with the members of the supergroup and their prior work, you will also know who wrote what at every moment in their combined works.
Garcia Hotspur is very much a Suda protagonist: cocky, loaded with swagger, but capable of showing softer emotions and more caring than his hardened exterior lets on. He’s got a sick jacket, is covered in tattoos, has decided against shirts as a concept, and carries a flashy and memorable weapon around. He’s also shown very cinematically whenever the opportunity arises: like his knowledge of and love for pro wrestling, Suda’s interest in film is always made clear by the way his cutscenes look, as well as plenty of the dialogue and Easter eggs scattered throughout his titles. I mean, Takashi Miike is in No More Heroes 2, as himself, and then appears in No More Heroes 3 (with a new, non-Miike actor) following a significant portion of the between-mission parts of the game being dedicated to Miike’s movies. (And this in a game where a major character from another game — not even one of Suda’s — arrives to help Travis Touchdown save the day at some point. No wonder EA never had any idea what Suda was trying to do.) Suda’s love of cinema is not exactly a secret, and it bleeds into and onto his own work, with Shadows of the Damned no exception.
This extremely Suda-protagonist is in a world that might be an adaptation of the original The Castle concept that he had been working on, but it all ends up feeling very Resident Evil 4 due to its structure, its encounters, and hell, even the whole castle/village thing. You’re in a third-person shooter with tank controls, trying to efficiently take down a variety of zombie-like creatures with headshots, and sometimes you’ll fight more significant enemies and bosses with giant glowing weak points that you need to first reveal. You can take the developer out of Capcom and then put him in his own studio after a brief run with PlatinumGames, but you can’t take the Capcom out of the developer.
Light and darkness are recurring themes and gameplay elements in Shadows of the Damned: when in the dark, Garcia takes damage, or, at least, slowly has his defenses lowered until he will be taking actual damage from said darkness. You have to find your way out of the darkness by finding the light, which can be accomplished in a few ways: using your light shot and firing it into a goat’s head that basically acts as a giant lamp for a room, or maybe blowing up a ton of the barrels that you find along the way. See? I told you that you can tell which ideas were Mikami’s. Those barrels aren’t stuffed with handgun ammo like in Resi 4, but instead, are nearly overflowing with light: darkness is the absence of light and all that, but the light needed somewhere to go. So, into destructable barrels it went, which can be a real nasty surprise for light-averse foes who end up in the blast radius of an exploding one.
Basic enemies have no real protections and can be taken out with a single well-placed headshot — an event that itself ends up having some cinematic flair — but more powerful foes start to don helmets that the (sigh) Boner can’t (sigh) penetrate, so instead you have to use Johnson’s shotgun form to rattle the thing right off. You always find enemies who have cloaked themselves in darkness, and you need to do something about that with the light shot or an exploding barrel or what have you before you can actually cause any damage to them. Foes will attack in groups and attempt to flank you rather than come at you head on, which is why it’s vital that you use the A button (on the Xbox 360, anyway) to immediately do a 180, rather than deal with the slow turn of tank controls without such an instant flip. You’ll be doing a bit of violent ballet here, firing off light shots to stun, to remove the protection of darkness, and doing so in between actual damage-causing shots meant to maim or kill — it’s all in the interest of whittling down opposing forces and buying yourself time until the room is clear.
By the end of the game, you’ll have picked up a few guns and spent quite a bit of time upgrading them with different colored gems. While there are just a few gun types, each has multiple forms. The Boner becomes the Hotboner, which can fire (siiiiiigh) a “sticky payload” to cause chain reaction explosions, which later becomes the Big Boner. The Teether is a submachine gun that upgrades into the TeethGrinder and then The Dentist. The Monocussioner shotgun transforms into the Skullcussioner, the Skullfest 9000, and finally, the Skullblaster. These various upgrades allow for different alternative firing options, as well as more powerful basic shots — you’ll upgrade these weapons into these new forms by collecting blue gems at specific junctures (like after defeating a boss) while the more basic stats for each weapon (and the light shot) are upgraded with red gems, which you find scattered around the game world.
There are some light puzzle elements here, but I really have to stress the “light” bit. The puzzles are setup so that you have to be standing in the right place to shoot an orb to open a door, and also standing in the right place is a physical danger to you and enemies are trying to kill you while you do it. Also sometimes there are doors that will only open if you shove a strawberry or a human brain inside the mouth of a newly arrived citizen of this hellscape, who has to put in the time as a tiny baby head door lock before they get to do things like walk around and be tortured by more powerful creatures for the rest of eternity. It’s both weird and offputting but also funny, because they aren’t actually a baby and the animation of their eyes going extremely wide when you force-feed them a strawberry so you can enter a weapons cache is pretty funny.
Hey, at least you feed them like they want. One of the early bosses you fight just impales one of these baby locks and rips the door off of its hinges. Garcia’s not here to kill the damned in general, you know: just the ones who stand between him and the love of his life, Paula.
The relationship between Garcia and Paula is the real star of the show here. It’s clear that Garcia truly loves Paula, and despite Johnson’s many remarks about her beauty, it’s not just because of that. She’s enchanting to him, a remarkable woman he fell for in a hurry, one he was willing to risk everything for in order to rescue when she was kidnapped by hell’s big bad. It was an obvious trap, a ploy to lure Garcia Hotspur, Demon Hunter to the home of the demons who hate him very much for being so good at his job, but he went in anyway rather than abandon the love of his life.
He’s haunted throughout his journey by images of Paula. Are they real? Are they a trap themselves? Is she actually dying again and again in front of his eyes like the game’s antagonist, Fleming, promised would happen? Or is this all just an elaborate way to break Garcia down by the time the confrontation with Fleming occurs? Regardless of what the answer could be, Garcia chases down these visions of Paula again and again, in the off chance it’s actually her that he’s seeing, just in case he’s able to save her — that’s what he’s here for, first and foremost, with revenge certainly on his mind, but not front and center.
Despite all the dick jokes, despite the obvious crassness of Johnson and his dialogue, despite the violence, it feels like Garcia truly does care for Paula, and that sweetness shines through the darkness of everything else in Shadows of the Damned. It’s not the love story of its age by any means, but there’s no denying it’s a love story. And an effective one at that, with plenty of supernatural twists and turns to make it fine for your average violence enjoyer to be happy with it.
Not that your average violence enjoyer ever bought or played Shadows of the Damned, but that’s a different problem. Sadly, no one can play it right now without a legitimate copy of it from either the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. The digital version was released on the Xbox 360 back in 2012, but was delisted in June of 2020. While it was on Game Pass for a time as well via EA’s own subscription service that’s included within that one, it’s since exited availability there as well, and has now been available nowhere for two years. It’s possible, given the timing, that EA just doesn’t own the rights they need to in order to keep it available any longer — Grasshopper Manufacture and EA are no longer contractually partnered with each other in any way — but that probably just leaves the game in limbo. EA likely still has control of the game they published, but can’t keep it available without reworking or extending their deal with Grasshopper. Hooray for business.
Shadows of the Damned is backwards-compatible on Xbox One and Series S|X models, at least, so if you can find a physical copy — something that’s become harder to do at a reasonable price the longer it can no longer be played digitally — you can still experience it. But it’s creeping up on that price point where it cost less to buy it new over a decade ago than it does to get it used now, and that’s not a great sign. It’s good, but it’s not break the bank levels of good unless you’re a Suda completionist, and if you are, well, you’ve probably already played this one.
It feels like a game that’s unlikely to receive a remake, but then again, so was Lollipop Chainsaw. That remake is happening without Suda, though, so there’s a be careful what you wish for thread to consider not tugging on here. It would just be neat if games could come out and then stay out in some form, especially when the technology — like Game Pass and EA Access — exist to ensure that this can happen. Shadows of the Damned is a victim of an inability to do even that much, though.
[Editor’s note: Shadows of the Damned was re-released in a remastered form — Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered — on Oct. 31, 2024, for Xbox One, Xbox Series S|X, Playstations 4 and 5, Nintendo Switch, and Windows.]
This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.