Have you ever played Dragon Age 2 and thought “what would really improve this game is incest?” No? You’re sure? Because someone did, and it wasn’t me.

You thought I was kidding, didn’t you?

Demonicon (or The Dark Eye - Demonicon; it’s listed as just “Demonicon” in Steam, but other sources have the full title) is a hack-and-slash action RPG set in a dark fantasy world. You play as Cairon, a refugee from the various monsters plaguing the world, hoping for a better life for himself and his family in the city of Warunk. Once there, however, the prospect of marrying off his sister to ensure that better life proves too much, and he fights to prevent the wedding.

You may think that preventing a wedding is a single plot point in this story, and that me ending my summary is a bit unfair, and you might have a point. However, I’d argue that focusing on this wedding - and specifically the sexual activity of the main female character - is a massive part of this game, and me summarising this game as “brother doesn’t want sister to get married for reasons that are definitely incestuous” is not wholly unfair. Demonicon is set in the Dark Eye setting, and while I’m not familiar with the setting and how this specific story plays into it, a not insignificant part of my dislike of the game is its story specifically.

even the sword is phallic please save me

The plot centres around Cairon and Calandra, siblings with a mysterious origin who have been warned their entire lives not to mingle their blood, lest bad things happen. Playing the game further reveals more of the specifics of that mysterious background and why they’re dangerous, but I won’t spoil that here. What’s more interesting to me is how much of the narrative of this game focuses on the policing of sexuality, virginity, and an obsession with bloodlines.

The first adventure of the game, for example, focuses on retrieving Calandra from a hidey hole to which she has retreated before her upcoming marriage to a man named Falk. Cairon is sent to find her and prevent her from having sex with someone other than Falk prior to the wedding, as Falk wants a virgin bride. Once found, Cairon’s conversations and quips with his sister centre around her virginity, his attraction to her, and her sexual behaviour more generally. They also occasionally fight monsters, though Calandra doesn’t contribute to any of the actual fights.

There’s nothing wrong with games that discuss and explore women’s sexualities. Where it becomes creepy is when that sexuality and purity is the sole motivation for the male characters to the exclusion of the female narrative. This is a game that centres on Cairon. It tells his story, and by extension, Calandra’s. Her life is never truly her own, her story never her own, and her sexuality certainly not her own. Instead, this is a story that objectifies and disempowers its main female character, turning her into her sexuality and the sexuality of her parents rather than a character in her own right. It takes the worst tropes and stereotypes of that pulpy 80s fantasy book cover, and cranks the dial all the way to eleven.

This is also not to say there’s no room for pulpy fantasy tropes, or for stories that explores themes like incest and bloodlines. However, when the surprise behind every corner has to do with who had sex with whom at some point in the past, or when a woman’s chastity is literally one of the factors that could lead to the end of the world, it’s hard to look past the idea that this is less a story with pulpy tropes, and more a story about male power fantasies and body control playing out on a fantastical stage.

Okay, but sometimes the quips are good.

This is, of course, not my only hang-up with Demonicon. While the world itself seems interesting - and decidedly reminiscent of the Dragon Age series - it is also difficult to explore through the wonky combat system. While Demonicon offers a wide range of talents and ways to specialise a character, in actuality, the range of ways to build a character are fairly limited.

Combat is a combination of spellcasting and melee combat, with the mana for spells coming from a character swinging their sword around and lopping heads off monsters. While the talent tree suggests it’s possible to build a pure mage spec, in practice, the melee component is absolutely necessary, making it impossible to build a non-melee character. When combined with the near-broken melee combat system, this becomes a frustrating exercise in trying and failing to work within the limits of an impossible system.

this is a metaphor for virginity

For a hack-and-slash, Demonicon’s actual hacking and slashing are fairly terrible. I’m not the best at this style of combat, but even I’m fairly certain a dodge roll should cause me to dodge and roll rather than getting stuck in a wall. Hacking at the enemy in front of me, logically, should cause me to hack the enemy in front of me, not spin in a delicate pirouette, hack the enemy behind me, and get bitten in the butt by the enemy I’d been trying to kill in the first place. Cairon felt less like a skilled fighter in his combats, and more like a ballerina trying to dance out the Nutcracker Suite while trapped in a genre for which they are ill-suited.

Even stepping back and trying to fight from range caused issues. Actually trying to cast spells caused me to vacillate between hitting whatever I’d decided was in front of me really hard or actually casting a spell with no real indication which it was going to be. The combat experience - one of the core elements of a hack-and-slash - was fairly terrible, making it difficult to want to keep playing.

Here’s the talent system, which I thought I should post, because that’s what people do, right?

Demonicon is a weird, weird game that feels like a relic of an age that no longer exists. This game was released the same year as Bioshock Infinite and The Last of Us. It is two years younger than Skyrim. This isn’t a knock on its graphics - which aren’t great, but are fine for what it is - or anything about its engine, but rather to say that the story it chooses to tell and how it chooses to tell it is archaic. Archaic can work, but need to be done with purpose and for a reason. Demonicon feels archaic because it wants to be archaic without any greater meaning. It resurrects long-dead tropes for no reason other than that it wants to be a necromancer, raising ghouls from the grave.

And we know what we do with necromancers.

Developer: Noumena Studios

Genre: Action Rpg, Hack And Slash

Year: 2013

Country: Germany

Language: English

Play Time: 19 Hours

Youtube: https://youtu.be/N-EAT_pxwJ8