To be completely up front about it, I really want to like Damon and Baby, but I just don’t. The premise is cute, the world has its charms, and the gameplay has an old-school feeling which should be ticking my boxes, but instead leaves me feeling rather flat. I do think this could hit just right for a lot of people, but for me, it’s just not engaging enough.
You take control of Damon and Baby, a demon and a baby, respectively. The two have ended up together because of a promise that happens before the story, and it basically means that Damon quite literally can’t get rid of Baby, and has also lost a bunch of his powers. What follows is a journey to unstick the two, and also get stronger along the way. it’s entertaining enough, but it’s not especially inspiring.
Combat is probably where most people will pin their hopes, especially as this comes from one of the best fighting game developers going: Arc System Works. Instead of brutal beatdowns and frame perfect inputs though, you have some guns to shoot and some hands to hit with. It’s fine… but that’s about it. While things do get more complicated as you go on, the game never really gains a huge amount of depth, and to be frank, I don’t know that it’s meant to.
It’s mostly just a twin-stick shooter, with all of the usual highs and lows that you would expect from that, but with a little less flare than many others in the genre. It’s almost passive in its simplicity, with you being able to avoid an awful lot of attacks by simply strafing, although the platforming can add some nice quirks to both the fights and exploration.
You can jump, of course, but the big draw is that you can yeet Baby and end up teleporting to them. That’s an amazing way to dodge, and I do really like it as a concept, but in practice, it’s funny, but not all that much fun. The difficulty of all of the aspects is all over the place too. While some fights will have you taking them down first time without stressing out, others end up feeling as though the controls are fighting against you, and so do the weird bugs.
Outside of frustrating things like ladders randomly not working, leading to softlocks for no fault of your own, the biggest issue for me was that a lot of projectiles just go through walls. It means that cover that you find can end up completely useless, and it also means your shots can randomly hit things you can’t even see. That’s right, it goes both ways. The trouble is, it goes against you a lot more than it goes with you, so even if there is a bit of cover hanging around, there’s no guarantee it’ll actually work.
