In Progress [NSFW, or anywhere really] Demonophobia

[Lord Rocket]

I can't believe there isn't an LP for this unbelievably turdy mess on this site yet. Let's fix that.

Anyway I can't be bothered writing much about this game since it is so shit, but basically you're a Japanese schoolgirl stuck in a poorly drawn vision of hell. Hilarity ensues (assuming you think copy-pasted MSPaint backgrounds, lazy animations and remarkably shit controls are funny)! There's also guro if that's your thing. A surprisingly small amount of guro considering this is supposed to be a, y'know, guro game.
Yeah, that's right. So basically we're guiding a spazzy schoolgirl - who suffers from an inability to run more than about ten metres in any direction, for example - through a shittily rendered version of Hell for the dubious reward of seeing her be messily dismembered. Oh and it's p badly programmed - there's a stupid bug in the very first room and the guy can't even mirror sprites (like, fucking seriously, Allegro or SDL_gfx or SFML or any number of other libraries does this for you. I'm not even a programmer and I know that. Did the creator think his 2d sidescroller - released in 2008 - wouldn't run fast enough if he didn't write his own routines in ASM or some shit?) or render his shitty backgrounds from tiles, which is extra embarrassing given that they're copy-paste MSPaint jobs - which I said before but it bears repeating. I know this because the resource files were made available by the guys who translated this turd (I wanted to see the schoolgirl naked without having to play through to the last level, which I'm going to have to do now anyway so fuck it). And, seriously, the .rar file with the translated version is 7.7mb while the .exe is 193mb. How the fuck do you even do that?

OK I got a little carried away there, but yeah this is terrible. But I'm going to LP it anyway, for two simple reasons: one, because I heard about this shit on this site and turnabout's fair play (you're getting off lightly), and two, because I've been depressed recently and, well, I need something constructive to do. Being who I am this translates to 'talk shit about guro games on the Codex' but it's better than nothing.

Maybe.

Lets get started.

UPDATES:

Update #1: Guh...geh...ghk...
Update #2: Higiiiii?!

LINKS:

Translation DL link here (prepatched .exe: WARNING NOT RECOMMENDED); resource files DL here; original translation thread here (old versions of translation, extraction tools, etc.)

Screenshot program is Greenshot; Autohotkey used to rebind keys when necessary; Paint.net for image maniupulation; Irfanview for batch image manipulation

 

[Excidium]

I remember seeing a video with all the different deaths you can get, it's p. cool.

I'd post it here but then nobody would follow your LP.

 

[Lord Rocket]

Alright this here:

Is the title screen. You don't get it if you haven't played before, making this as good a point as any to tell you all that I have played this dog before. Specifically I got about halfway through area three (I think there's seven levels in total, don't quote me on that though) before giving up in disgust. After that point this will be a blind LP.

We're selecting area one for obv reasons. Monologue:

... and that's what we see when we start the game. Gosh what's that in the hole?

Fun* fact: you have to be in a fairly specific place to activate the switch (the tip of her knee should be 'touching' the crack in the wall; if you cover too much of the switch with your body it won't work) which may lead you to try various different things to get it to work. Interestingly,** if you crouch and then press up you'll skip straight to level two. I'm not quite sure how you'd even code a bug like that, since I'm pretty sure you'd have to write a specific if/then sequence to make it work; forgetting to comment out dev mode perhaps? Pretty dumb mistake if you ask me, anyway.

* no
** no

Anyway we're not going to skip level one.

Here's the second room. as you can see it's just as atrociously ugly as the first one. You can also see there's a bird-looking thing in there (three full frames of animation). The enemies in this game are generally 'puzzle' baddies, that is you have to work out the best way to get past them. In the bird's case you crawl along on hands and knees; I guess demons go to the same optometrist as the enemies in the Metal Gear games.

If you don't crawl they sort of spaz up and down on top of your head:

Threatening!
Actually the enemy designs in this game aren't so bad, but the guy fucks it up by animating them badly. In the bird's case, there's two frames of it flapping upwards and then only one for it flapping down so it looks a lot like it's limping along. If I was in schoolgirl's place - yeah she has a canon name but I've forgotten it; it's Sakura or Saiyuki or something like that - I'd probably try and give them a hug or some shit.
Some of you might be wondering where schoolgirl's portrait went; I pressed A to get rid of it. It functions as a health metre (the white border steadily gets redder as you take damage) but mostly just impedes visibility. Schoolgirl's expresion on the sprite changes when she's low on health anyway (she looks even more gormless, if such a thing is even possible), so there's no point in having it at all.

Anyway that door's locked, not that the game tells you this if you press up while you're standing by it. Fetch quest ahoy. Go to: other side of the room.

What's that on the floor? I'd better walk past that malevolent looking eye thing to get it.

Uh OK. Insta death and pee, and a very absorbent stone floor. We'll be seeing a lot of all of these things. And yes, if you die, you have to start again from the last checkpoint (usually the beginning of the level or prior to the most recent boss 'battle'). Would respawning the player in the same room have been so hard*?

* no

Blah blah blah press R to respawn, I bypass the bird and shit again, crawl under the eye, and receive:

You press Z to interact with shit, by the way. The game uses the usual arrows/ZXC jap control scheme which is, at least, functional. Hold space to access your inventory; this doesn't pause the game. Scroll along to the old key and release space.

So yeah this is what it looks like through the door. Not much of an improvement right?
We're introduced to enemy type no. 2 here. You need to run past these guys (hold X). If you try to walk or crawl by they sort of feel you up:

To get them off you need to hammer the Z key heaps fast. As a general rule, though, there'll be birds and other enemy types to attack you while these dorks hold you in place, making them more annoying than you might think. The fact schoolgirl can't run across even one whole screen doesn't help either.

Anyway if you go through to the other side of the screen there's another dumb insta death trap:

(That's her low health expression in the 5th and onwards pictures, by the way).
You might think after crushing you it'd withdraw and there'd be visuals of squashed schoolgirl for you to whack it to, but there's not. I even went and made my dinner after this, just in case I wasn't waiting long enough (I had kangaroo steak and three veg).
So yeah, this is what I meant when I said this game doesn't have as much guro as you'd think in the introduction, it's constantly missing opportunities for perfectly good unique death sequences. AND after this lacklustre, not to mention long winded, shit I had to start the level again.

Let's see what's through that green door:

Gosh where's the insta death trap in this room I don't know. I'd better walk heaps slow across those black lines.

The camera tracks down for the big reveal. I like the fact he can do that and apply transparency/blending/whatever it's called but can't flip a fucking sprite.
I don't know why that pisses me off so much.

Derp run over the pit and get the thing:

Golly I wonder if this fits in the hole in the ceiling crusher room.

A wild door appears!
(Pokemon 'jokes' are not very effective...)

I agree with absolutely every sentiment she expresses here. Except for that last one, shit games can't be scary.

(Shots not quite in sequence but you get the idea)
This sequence is the first boss 'battle' and it is what it is, I guess. Shit comes out the floor and the ceiling, or occasionally both in rapid succession, and you either walk past it or duck under it. Insta death occurs if you try to run:

Look closer at the vadg blood.

Or if you get bit by ceiling worm:

Nice blood splatter fx.

If you make it across the room without arbitrarily dying (I'll talk a little more about this next update because I am tired of thinking about this shit right now), which isn't too hard unless it is two in the morning and you are consumed by self loathing, you will make it to level two:

Next update: this game keeps on giving (and I'll try to crop some of the images a bit when necessary too).

 

[Crooked Bee]

Star Command

 

[Lord Rocket]

I remember seeing a video with all the different deaths you can get, it's p. cool.

I'd post it here but then nobody would follow your LP.

There's one on Youtube for levels 1-3 I think, but none for later on. If I could have just watched that I wouldn't be doing this LP, heh.

Star Command

We'll see.

 

[laclongquan]

Watching another Codexer going mad always is entertaining.

 

[lightbane]

From Skryim Lps, (shitty) visual novels with cripples, date games with birds, to this... Something terrible is happening with the Codex.

 

[Akasen]

I saw at least one image and nearly had a heart attack at the dreaded thought of what this may have been. But then I realized it was nothing but gore.

 

[Yeesh]

 

[LundB]

Seriously though, do continue. I hope you come out the other end with a reasonable number of sanity points intact. I'll be watching.

 

[Lord Rocket]

OK I have taken 90% of the screenshots for level two, but I'm going to try and set up AHK to take screenshots every half a second or something for the boss fight, shit's annoying enough to get through without having to hammer the sshot key at the same time

I was thinking (term used under advisement) though; if you were in a similar situation to schoolgirl in the red room/ceiling crusher above, what position would you take to ensure a quick death, or at least induce unconsciousness so you don't have to feel your flesh being compressed etc.? I'm really not sure, but should I find myself in such a situation this is definitely something I'd want to know.
Enlighten me, Codex.

 

[Lord Rocket]

Here's something you might not know: it's a nice sunny day and there is a swimming pool not more than a dozen steps from my door. And yet, here I am. I hope you guys appreciate me.

UPDATE: 13 steps, nvm

Anyway I'm back with PART 2 of this delightful LP. Get your cocks out boys.
There is one thing I forgot to mention the last time: this game has no sound. At all*. So, we need to supply our own soundtrack; the official soundtrack of this LP is therefore Rutabaga Salad (the music should start, and loop, automatically when you follow the link. Official video is here). Of course, you can listen to whatever you want while reading this, but modifying this LP in such a way may constitute a violation of my IP. Consider yourselves warned.

* As far as terrible design decisions go, this is probably the worst. In all seriousness, this game could have been pretty creepy with some good ambient noise, not to mention the fact shit would have been much more gruesome. The game's still good for what it is** though.
** no

That aside, the topic at hand is Area 2, which is where we're up to. Do you remember what it looks like?

Removing the window borders was a serious technical achievement on my part, by the way.
Before we go any further, I want to say that level 2 is pretty tame compared to level 1, both in terms of instadeath and the 'quality' (relative term) of the killing. Let's get the first instadeath trap out of the way.

How is anyone supposed to beat it to this phoned in bullshit?
(Also: dat foot)

Whatever. Let's look through the non-instadeath door.

Nothing much of interest in here. We'll go left first.

In this room we're intro'd to our first enemy combo; a bird and a blob. OK, look, I have no idea how to segue into this shit gracefully, but I have a theory on the origins of those blob things, and I spent like an hour making a shitty 'photoshop' (actually I used Paint.net) and I'm gonna use it:

Why is it so hard to find good romantic fireside pics anyway? Surely jpgs of roaring fireplaces/champaggers is the chick equivalent of double anal deepthroat photos?
Actually maybe that's the issue, like, no-one looks at still shots any more because increasing download speeds and generous bandwidth limits have made it easier and easier to watch roaring fires in 1080p instead on streaming sites like XNFireplace or YouHearth.com.
That was a dumb joke and poorly delivered. I'm not sorry.

The key to getting past these guys is to coax the bird as close to the edge of the screen as you can and then, when it flies away from you, bolt it past the moleblob. Simple stuff.
The green door has a room with two things in it:

The first is a secret passage; crouch and press Z to remove the loose stones (we'll look at that in a sec).
The second is that rather obvious trap. Now, judging by the shape and size of the hole, you might assume it's a Pince of Persia-style slicer, but it's actually:

A big, thick, wooden horse type thing (see also: TheEntitledOne's sexcellent Words Worth LP). Dunno how that fits in there, but this is Hell, I guess. This trap doesn't kill you but it does reduce your health. Take note of that last frame, too, we'll be seeing it again shortly.
Let's go through the hole.

Not much of interest really. We can't intereact with the pedestal yet, but at least we know it's there now.

You can also exit via the left side of the bird/moleblob room:

That's the exit door, which we can't open yet. The shiny thing is Red Medicine. Chugging this down restores a little health, as you might expect (nice of the demons to leave these lying around).

We haven't had an instadeath trap for a while, so let's take a short break and check out what's behind the bloodstained door in the second room (different save, hence why there's nothing in the inventory):

BETTER GO PRESS Z BY THAT PEDESTAL

I really can't emphasise enough how interminable this sequence is. Fucking billions of cycles of that shitty two-frame punching animation. Her arms seem to have been replaced with sand-filled socks as well (not that they were ever particularly well rendered, but jeez).

We'll bypass that shit and wander eastwards.

Bypassing this room is basically the same as the moleblob/bird room we covered before; coax bird, run over trap.

Astute viewers will recognise the secret door. I know I didn't (seriously, I had to consult a walkthrough to know it was there. To be fair, I didn't go into this room after the first time, since I figured it just led to the trap we're gonna see now, so technically I was only retarded once. In any case, one of the few good things about this game is that every location has some sort of point. Wait - am I just saying that because I have, like, Stockholm Syndrome or something now?).
Let's get instadeathed before we progress:

This is, if anything, even more boring than the beating we received earlier, which at least had animation. This shit, by contrast, is some dialogue, a yellow overlay, and then a sprite replacement. At least it's a lot shorter.

Sekrit door:

I literally have no idea what the fuck that pink thing on the wall is supposed to be. Intestines maybe? Anyway that guy just now shows up and he's too scary, I guess. Especially if you're a table, which is something he doesn't seem to like very much.
I'm pretty sure he's also the end-of-game boss, since we'll be seeing him again. SOON
When he's gone, we'll go through the hole.

You can probably imagine what happens if we walk across those, but don't bother because I'll show you in a sec. Anyway the low down ones flicker in and out of existence so you can bypass them:

Fuck up and you get this:

There's a different sprite if you get it when you're crawling, but in-game shots aren't worth the hassle really, so here's a rip from the sprite sheets instead:

I'm seriously shrugging so hard right now.
Onwards...

And all the way back to that empty pedestal to put the stone in place. What's the worst that could happen***?

*** WELL ACTUALLY, we could get instadeathed and have to start the whole fucking level over again, which is pretty bad. But we don't so it's OK.

Now we get to go grab the Unlocked Hexagram (unless you want to go try use the Sealed Hexagram on the exit door first, but nothing happens so we won't). Back through the bloodstained door...

Which will hopefully stop fucko from spawning.

But of course, it doesn't.

Ugh boss fight. Fucko has four attacks:

These are the first three he uses. Basic tactics for this fight is to stay in the middle of the room and to walk/run back and forth while fucko teleports around and tries to hit you, which won't work unless he catches you while you're changing direction or if you're crawling. Every so often, though, he'll use his hug attack, the last one there, which requires you to duck to dodge it (the extra dumb thing is that the choke attack - in the middle - can be avoided by running away OR ducking).
You should have inferred from that sentence that there is no consistent collision detection in this game - you're either ducking or you're not, and it doesn't matter which side of the screen your respective sprites are on. I said I was going to talk a little about the arbitrariness of the game this update, and this shit is a pretty big offender. It doesn't help much that ducking isn't instantaneous; that is, the game plays an intermediate frame, during which you are halfway down to your knees but are still considered standing. So, you get situations where you're pressing the duck button but you still get hurt by attacks you should have dodged (especially annoying when the sprites are obviously not touching; and super duper extra 'specially annoying when the attack you should have dodged is fucking instadeath).
Like, honestly, if the designer had done the sensible thing and just incremented the 'is_ducking' var when the button is pressed/released, not only would this shit be infinitely more pleasureable to play, but the attack 'wind-up' cycles could have been made shorter, entailing no loss of difficulty. I guess what I'm saying here is fuck this cunt game.

(Sorry, I had to reconstruct that sequence from what was available to me. I mean, sure, I could change the timer to be properly sequential but I blew my img-editing wad on the mole-fiend love scene)
This is fucko's fourth attack, which he'll start using after twenty-five seconds. Yeah you have to put up with this shit for forty seconds, it's p. awful.
Anyway the laserblast is instadeath, which is bad, but easy to dodge, which is good, since it's easy to tell when he's going to use it. That is, he teleports into a corner instead of right next to you like he usually does.

If you survive for 40 seconds the door unseals and you're free to do a runner. At this point fucko charges up another energy blast that I gather (from lesser LPs etc.) is unavoidable instadeath, but there's no way in hell I'm going to do the whole fight over for the dubious pleasure of showing you lot whatever happens (hey you didn't even answer my question about ceiling crushers; fuck you guys).

Anyway five goes (well, three really, I got killed deliberately twice) later, we're out of there. Let's look at some deaths first though.

Both boring. They would have been greatly improved with a nice wet snap sort of sound effect, but at least she wets herself in the first one. I suppose.

I'd animate that for you but Paint.net doesn't play so well with .gifs.
This is, of course, the energy blast death. The first time I noticed her skirt fall down (it actually took a couple of laser deaths for me to realise this; I was kinda busy screaming and flailing at the keyboard the first time) I laughed for like five minutes straight.

You can imagine the depths of my nerdrage at this specific sequence (protip: check the timer). Anyway, you should recognise that last frame**** - this is actually the generic death, more typically seen when you get killed by the basic monsters. I actually like that frame a lot since schoolgirl looks more like she's enduring a geography lesson, instead of, y'know, dying. But then dying of boredom is a distinct possibility while playing this tripe.

**** because I told you to keep an eye out for it. No-one ever listens.

I did throw one last tantrum before finishing the level, though:

Yep, killed by a bird on the second to last screen. Schoolgirl ran out of stamina while trying to get away from it, and it got its claws in me before I could duck. Fortunately I respawned in the start room with the Unlocked Hexagram so I wasn't compelled to smash my PC or anything (small favours etc.).

SNEAK PREVIEW OF LEVEL THREE

Next update: Unfortunately, yes

 

[Crooked Bee]

This game is quite a thing.

 

[Lord Rocket]

Having perused the sprite sheets I can safely say that BUH BUH BUH BABY YOU JUST AIN'T SEEN NOTHIN YET
(and you won't until at least the fourth level, level three is fucking tame as well)

Anyway bros, let's bump dis shit to the second page before the next update kay

 

[Krash]

Gaddam dis be sum high art yo. What the fuck compels someone to make a game like this?

Also, you sound like you need a . So there.

 

[Yeesh]

You son of a bitch.

 

[Lord Rocket]

Gaddam dis be sum high art yo. What the fuck compels someone to make a game like this?

Also, you sound like you need a . So there.

Well, ordinarily, being Japanese would be sufficient inducement for this sort of thing, but apparently the creator is Korean. That said, I guess Jp. did rape it's way into Korea's gene pool in the early 20th, and the original script was in Jp., so he obviously sympathises.

And,

You son of a bitch.

 

[desocupado]

Why you hate yourself so much bro?

I would be in that pool like stink on a hippie.

 

[Alex]

Heh, Deso has a good point there. I mean, from your own description, this game seems painful not only to watch, but to play as well. Still, the Sierra games reference alone made this update worth to me, so keep up the good work!

 

[Crooked Bee]

Bump.

 

[Lord Rocket]

Heh, Deso has a good point there. I mean, from your own description, this game seems painful not only to watch, but to play as well. Still, the Sierra games reference alone made this update worth to me, so keep up the good work!

Basically? Boredom is a terrible thing.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Indeed. Watch some Orange Caramel to balance your life, Lord Rocket!

 

[Radisshu]

Oh god, what the fuck?

Can you imagine the person who made this game as he's (I assume it's a he) working on it? The gore combined with the mediocrity makes it all look so incredibly pathetic.

Anyway, if I were in a room with a slowly moving ceiling that would crush me I guess I'd use some piece of my clothes to strangle myself beforehand.

 

[pipka]

Words can't express how shitty this looks.

 

[Fafnir]

Bump.