After its big unveiling in issue 65 of PCGZine last year, not much has been seen of the darker than dark RPG, Demonicon. Behind the scenes, developer Noumena Studios has been making changes, with protagonist Cairon swapping his short cropped hair for a higher grade and, surprisingly, Creative Director Eric Jannot is no longer working on the project. We have no idea of the story behind this change of personnel, but despite being several months on from the last time we saw Demonicon in action, its Alpha form seemed fairly encouraging.
The initial tutorial quest of a cannibal stealing villagers to dial up his magical power was still there, as was Cairon’s uncomfortable infatuation with his fiery redheaded sister, sending the character down a dark, dangerous path. A lot of Demonicon’s appeal is distilled into its dark fantasy setting, with the character’s downfall running parallel with a town which has yet to fall to evil pillaging forces in a grand, continent-wide war. If you aren’t familiar with The Dark Eye universe it seems to share a lot in common with Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, only darker and more German…
The third-person combat still relies on the predictable tropes of strafing and rolling while slashing or chucking ranged magic attacks at groups of enemies, but the gameplay looked sharper than what we’d seen before, with combos feeling tighter and enemy behaviour more varied thanks to signature moves. What was new was the genuinely unsettling introduction of a new Priestess antagonist known as Azorial who is revealed to players by, we kid you not, sacrificing multiple human babies to conjure a fleshy demon giant into the world. Couple this adult-only content with deep moral decisions which vary from dark to not-quite-so-dark and it’s clear that Noumena aren’t afraid of courting a little controversy with their debut game.
Overall, development on Demonicon seems to be continuing well and Noumena certainly don’t seem to be compromising on their unflinchingly gnarly setting. We’ll learn more about that soon no doubt.
