When I first played this game after reaching it in my backlog, I decided to postpone it shortly afterward because it was of such high quality, I wanted to save it for when I had played a lot of bad games in a row. When I finally went back and beat it, I decided to put together a small mod for it before posting about it here because I thought the mod would only take a couple weeks to make. It ended up taking over five months, but it’s finally done now, so now it’s finally time for me to post about one of my favorite games I played this year:

Despite the title, there’s no detective-style Adventure gameplay; this is a straightforward, linear platformer in the same vein as the Super Mario games. There are even blocks you can jump at from below to get coins–or you can jump on top of them to do the same, with the coins even popping out in the other direction, which is kinda funny. There are nine worlds, each with eight levels and a boss, and each level has three paintings you can collect. Like your typical collectathon, you’ll need enough paintings to unlock later worlds, but unlike most collectathons, almost every level in this game is strictly linear, with the paintings’ sprites indicating if it’s the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd so you’ll know if you missed one and can go back for it.

You can even get a variety of power-ups that you use by pushing the run button, though many of these take inspiration from other popular franchises, such as a whip or an arm cannon that you can charge by holding the run button. There are so many different power-ups, in fact, that a few of them rarely ever show up and feel like they weren’t designed to work in most of the levels, but that’s a fairly minor problem since 1) most power-ups DO work with the levels and 2) your previous power-up goes into your reserve slot when you get a new one, so if you accidentally get one you don’t want to use, you can just switch back.

The game also has a bunch of different characters you can play as, each of which has a unique ability (on top of whatever power-up you might have). On top of this, the eight main worlds each have a key you can find, and for every two keys you collect, you can unlock an additional playable character, each with their own special ability (though the game never tells you that none of the unlockable characters can use power-ups), and if you miss a key, there are NPCs in the hub that give you hints on where to find them so you don’t have to blindly replay each level to find them. That said, just like the power-ups, character abilities can range from “very useful” to “doesn’t really work with this game.” For example, one character lets you run through enemies without taking damage, which sounds useful, but then you’ll discover that the vast majority of levels have just enough verticality that you can’t really make use of this power, as you’ll hit a wall or a mandatory drop-down right when the power starts to activate.

However, both of those aren’t huge issues because every character can beat every level and get every painting and key; you’re never forced to use a power that doesn’t work with the level. The first painting in Load-Bearing Grid might look like it can only be reached by the double-jump character, but it turns out the dev was just really bad at introducing the fact that the game has invisible blocks, which are used to get exactly two paintings in the game and never used again (so there’s the game’s first mark against it). Still, even when a painting or key does requires a power-up to obtain, said power-up is always in the level itself, so you never need clairvoyance or a second playthrough to get 100%. There used to be a couple that didn’t, but the dev is very responsive and put out an update to address them after I left some comments about them (but he didn’t replace the invisible blocks, though). Sure, the game has an inventory system where extra power-ups you collect are sent to a storage you can withdraw from, but you can only use it on the world map, and the levels don’t really give you any clues as to what power-ups would be good to bring into them, so it doesn’t address the “you’d have to play the level twice to get the collectible” issue, which means the inventory ends up being one more thing that you’ll rarely end up using. Still, when the worst thing that can be said about a game is “some mechanics don’t add anything and might as well be ignored,” that speaks to the quality of everything else.

Well, there is one bigger issue: the game has a lot of drop-offs that go below the camera, and the game never explains that you can hold up or down to pan the camera, so I just thought the game had a lot of blind jumps at first. Most of the game is good about not doing this, but then you’ve got levels like Monument Valley where you have to jump across pillars that place the ground just barely below the bottom of the screen, so you won’t know if there’s safe ground or instakill quicksand there until you stop and pan the camera down. The drawbridge level in Caldera Keep is especially bad about doing this, what with it being a mostly vertical level where you travel downwards and have to avoid falling into the occasional lava pit.

As for why this issue is so prevalent? Turns out, most of the levels in this game are literally 1:1 copies from its now-delisted prequel, which had a more zoomed-out camera that shows more of the level at once. The tileset and backgrounds might have been switched out, and there might be a minor tweak to the level design every few stages, but really, if you’ve played one game, you’ve played both. The only meaningful difference is that the first game has a completely different set of bosses, as that game switches to a bullet hell for boss fights while the second game stays a platformer throughout. There are also a small handful of levels that are exclusive to each version, such as the first game having a level that actually introduces the invisible blocks in a somewhat-intuitive way, or how the second game’s final world is made up of all-new levels. I looked up an archive of the first game because I enjoyed the second game so much, but man, my disappointment grew as I realized it was quite literally just a less polished version of its “sequel.” This also explains the second game’s issue with certain power-ups and character abilities: they were quite literally afterthoughts shoehorned into a game that was never designed to accomodate them.

Oh, and speaking of the final world, I wasn’t a huge fan of it, either. The gimmick there is that it has a lot of black enemies in front of dark backgrounds–often with an additional darkness effect surrounding you, so you won’t see the enemies until you get close and thus barely have any time to react to them (if at all).

Still, even with those issues, I can recommend the game for its consistent quality with everything else and for having quite a lot of well-made levels for only $5. You can buy it here: https://yaru.itch.io/daemon-detective-gaiden-2 and I’m not just saying that because my mod is giving me a conflict of interest; I’d have recommended it even without the mod. Heck, you may already have the game since it went free back in 2020, so you might not even need to buy it to play it. Really, the only situation where I wouldn’t recommend it is if you’ve beaten the first game, because again, that means you’ve basically beaten the second game already.