From the developer behind Devil Daggers comes one of the most psychedelic and chaotic-looking games I have ever played. Hyper Demon is a first person shooter that drops you in a unique arena where you battle disjointed blobs that resemble enemies. Even with the minimal controls, there is a lot to master with the abilities and weapons it offers to create insane combos and cataclysmic super moves. And with spherical projection, you can essentially have a 360 degree sensory awareness of threats. It is also super easy to challenge friends from Steam and Discord, as well as easily create clips to be uploaded easily.
While I can keep going, this game is seriously a treat. I played and got massively confused, but loved every second of it. And on Steam Deck, Hyper Demon fits in like a charm...with the right settings of course! When it first released, it didn't work with Proton, but thankfully, an update fixed that and it now works fantastic! The game doesn't have many graphical options either, so default settings were our goal, but it wasn't great to start out this way.
When running Hyper Demon, it immediately hit dips of 40 FPS and the graph was very unstable. I set a GPU Clock Speed Frequency to 900 to combat this and it ended up working like a charm! Set this with a TDP of 7 and you will get around 3.5 - 4 hours of battery life with sub 65c temps. This stayed pretty consistent and didn't experience many drops afterwards, though there was a slight fluctuation from time to time.
I didn't experience any game breaking bugs, but I will make a special note of the controls. Hyper Demon doesn't have controller support, so the default Steam Input scheme is keyboard + mouse. For the most part, it does work, but you will need to use the right trackpad or analog stick to move the mouse cursor to navigate menus and such.
I also had one bug where my audio wouldn't turn down when I used the volume up/down on my Deck. A game restart fixed this, but it is something to note!
This game is a trip. I can't say that enough. The visuals and style is so unique and defined that I keep coming back just to push my score higher in the leaderboards. This is a small game, but it is so impactful with its stylized art, audio, and overall gameplay. Now that it is working on the Deck, it is one I will definitely keep coming back to!
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back!
Hyper Demon is a trip that will be very hard to wake up from, especially when I can play it in bed with my Steam Deck.
