I think if you were to travel back in time to around the 14th century to wherever Dante Alighieri was at the time, and showed him Hell Maiden, a roguelike, bullet hell, deckbuilding, ’90s anime-esque, essentially fan fiction sequel to his Divine Comedy, he’d probably say something like “Mama mia” and die on the spot in fear of what his own creation spawn hundreds of years later. Yet as ridiculous a concept as it is – and it is ridiculous – the demo for it is quite good.
To compare it to other games, Hell Maiden is like a mash-up of Hades and Vampire Survivors, the latter leading the charge in moment-to-moment gameplay. You play as Dante himself, or in this case, herself, who is back in hell after having reached Paradiso, with amnesia. And so she begins the ascension to heaven once more!
When you start off, you’re armed with Dante’s quill, which sends out fiery blasts every second or so akin to Vampire Survivor’s whip. You can have up to four weapons (at least that appears to be the limit in the demo), said weapons represented as cards. Leveling up gives you the opportunity to choose from three new cards, which most of the time will be weapon modifiers, doing things like adding more projectiles, increasing damage, that sort of thing, but you’ll occasionally get new weapons to use.
If you pull a duplicate modifier card, you can fuse them with another to improve it, or place it on a different weapon if you so choose. There are even some cards that can affect multiple weapons depending on where you place them.
Like in other Vampire Survivor clones you don’t have much control over your attacks, though you can point them in one direction while moving in another, so you do have some control. This feels solid too, at no point did I feel frustrated or overwhelmed by what was on screen, I know each of my deaths was my own fault. It’s all quite tightly woven together, especially impressive considering that whenever the game does launch it’ll do so in early access.
The Hades element crops up in the form of narrative structure more than anything. Upon death you’re brought to The Forum, a hub area where you can hang out and chat with various Poets of Limbo, such as Homer, Virgil, and Horace. It seems that befriending them lets you unlock other starter weapons, and they all allow you to pick up different weapon and modifier cards too.
All of this is wrapped up in an incredibly well rendered vaguely ’90s anime art style, at least when it comes to the dialogue scenes. The rest of the game is mostly pixel art, but there are special moves you can use that do screen-wide damage following some stellar, fully animated cutscenes showing off these anime girlified versions of, I would like to remind you, very real poets.
For the most part just mashing up genres, even if it’s done well, doesn’t inherently colour me interested in a game, but with its extremely well realised concept, I am currently sold on Hell Maiden. I just hope no one invents time travel so Dante doesn’t die sooner than he was meant to.
Hell Maiden doesn’t have a release date just yet, but when it gets one, it’ll launch in early access. You can wishlist it on Steam now.