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What’s it? A grim first-person dungeon crawler closely impressed by King’s Area and early survival horrorRelease date Might 13, 2025Expect to pay $20/£16.75Developer J. R. HudepohlPublisher Prime Hat StudiosReviewed on RTX 3060 (laptop computer), Ryzen 5 5600H, 16GB RAMSteam Deck Official standing is “unknown”, however it works brilliantly out of the boxLink Steam
Labyrinth of the Demon King is a merciless, depressing dungeon crawler set in a collapsing feudal Japan. I am a lowly foot soldier, or ashigaru, looking for to avenge the homicide of my lord and his military by the hands of the demon king. As you possibly can think about, the percentages are hopelessly stacked in opposition to me. My katana is damaged, I tire simply, and the labyrinth I am pressured to navigate is probably the most miserable and complicated entanglement of slender halls and non-descript rooms I’ve visited for the reason that PS1 period. To not point out that the demon king is overtly mocking me together with his arcane puzzles and repulsive yokai.
This nasty 15-hour journey belongs to a brand new era of dungeon crawlers closely indebted to King’s Area, a darkish fantasy FromSoftware sequence that prefigured the Darkish Souls video games. Labyrinth of the Demon King follows within the footsteps of Lunacid, which popularised the revival, and there are tonnes of comparable forthcoming video games on my Steam wishlist in the mean time together with Hark the Ghoul and Monomyth. Labyrinth trades Lunacid’s oft-lurid VHS fantasy for an oppressive commingling of Buddhist folklore and survival horror grime, whereas additionally advancing—albeit incrementally—the complexity of the fight you possibly can often anticipate in video games of this ilk.
About that fight: I used to be prepared to surrender Labyrinth of the Demon King after concerning the two-hour mark. The sport forces a fight tutorial straight out of the gate, however I used to be nonetheless getting my arse handed to me. My ashigaru is tortoise-slow, with a stamina bar that depletes at an alarming clip with each flailing, poorly timed swing of my katana. Dodging as soon as does not deplete my miserly stamina bar, but when I dodge once more inside a four-second cooldown, it does, and the penalty is gigantic. If I occur to get hit by any of the squealing, maddened figures whose assaults I can parry inside a tiny window, I lose my cool and demise is definite.
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However then I be taught to kick. There’s a kick button, and for a very long time I uncared for to make use of it. Kicking an enemy staggers them for lengthy sufficient to get a risk-free thrust in, and takes the sting off the in any other case overwhelmingly tense fights. I finally realized that the fight was actually simply testing my capacity to remain cool throughout terrifying encounters. As soon as this got here collectively—and as soon as I began to know a number of the different quirks of the sport, such because the bonfire-like save system, and the significance of working away—it wasn’t lengthy earlier than I flipped. Not solely was I not going to drop Labyrinth anymore, I turned obsessive about it.
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It is surprisingly simple for this to occur. The demon’s labyrinth is cut up into 4 main areas, and except for some refreshing out of doors sections, it just about all seems to be the identical. Each floor is caked in an unspecified brown-grey ooze. Doorways and sometimes entire halls might be blocked by mysterious respiration gore piles. Many doorways, after all, are jammed or locked. It is an oppressively bleak and monotonous world to spend a very long time in, and but, the illogically twisting halls and ruined rooms do handle to depart an impression, a lot in order that by the top I felt I knew the map pretty nicely.
In the meantime, the enemies themselves—and even the NPCs—are rendered inscrutable by their nascent 3D stylings. It took me some time to grasp a service provider cat, for example, was a cat. With regards to the demons, the chunky pixels surrender element and subtlety in favour of a generalised fetidness: it looks like I am slashing away (or working away) from a mass of horrific sentient polyps, and that is in some way scarier than if it had been a meticulously polygonal tackle the akaname.
It’s most likely value dwelling on this stylistic resolution. Not less than a half-dozen horror video games launch on Steam each week that plunder the wobbly unrealness of mid-’90s 3D graphics. It’s grow to be a shortcut in direction of a sure disarranging horror impact that extra trendy displays can’t hope to match. However within the case of Labyrinth, the graphics are literally murkier and extra degraded than the ’90s materials it channels. This makes the enemies scarier and extra inscrutable, sure, however it additionally lends the sport a homebrew ruthlessness paying homage to video nasties. It total looks like one thing nobody within the ’90s would dare to carry to market: it has the sense of one thing forbidden about it.
However as terrifying because the beasts and hallways are, by mid-game I felt far much less threatened. There are a bunch of various weapons, all upgradable, starting from my starter katana by means of to an otsuchi (“very heavy hammer”), a Nice Dao (“large sword”), and naginatas, axes, spears—even a rifle, all with completely different assault speeds and stamina trade-offs. There are additionally talismans, which I principally forgot to make use of, however which have each offensive and defensive capabilities. The issue tapers off by the midway mark, principally because of familiarity with the fight system, however upgrading my well being and stamina actually helped (belief me: prioritize the latter), and so did an understanding of the motion patterns of the roaming Nuribotoke, a stalking determine modelled after Resident Evil’s Mr. X.
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There aren’t lots of puzzles however all of them make a dim sort of sense, often requiring lots of backtracking throughout the map. One among my colleagues tended to wrestle with those I discovered simple, and vice versa, however all have options any midway observant participant will resolve with no hassle. Many clues are hidden in scrolls discovered on the earth, and studying these might be as discomforting as roaming the halls: beware some disturbingly detailed descriptions of the Buddhist Eight Hells.
Labyrinth of the Demon King is predominantly the work of a single individual, J. R. Hudepohl, and it undoubtedly looks like the results of a productive obsession. I do not know if a staff may make one thing this quietly disturbing with out somebody piping as much as ask: how will individuals cope? I will not lie: as I watched the credit roll on Labyrinth of the Demon King I felt an unutterable sense of reduction that I might by no means must roam these halls once more, with their drones of mysterious provenance, and the wheezing of their gross denizens. However I am certain glad I did no less than as soon as: that is probably the most potent bizarre horror we’re prone to see in 2025.
