Demon Skin Critic Reviews

Demon Skin cherry-picks mechanics from your favourite games and presents them in a deliciously gory fruit salad.

Demon Skin feels more like a vertical slice of a great game than a product of its own. It’s short, it’s not polished enough, but the core gameplay is solid. Hopefully, the studio will get a bigger budget next time – there’s a lot of potential here.

Demon Skin is a mix of many genres combined together to achieve the goal of standing out from the crowd.

When Demon Skin works, it works pretty well – it’s a nice-looking title with an interesting story and some combat mechanics that set it apart from other similar games. Unfortunately, its missteps are just too impactful on the overall experience to ignore. If you have the patience of a saint, you might find enough here to enjoy. If time is at a premium, and you don’t fancy the slog, I just can’t recommend it. A real shame.

Demon Skin isn’t a bad game, but it is ropey and certainly needed more work where the animations and menus are concerned.

A half-baked game with an interesting concept.

This just annoys the hell out of me because with the original Dark Souls approaching its 10th birthday, there are a lot of gamers out there who only know the game by association. I honestly think it gives people the wrong impression of what the genre can be like, and it cheapens the original masterpiece. Just like how first-person-shooters were called doom-clones before it, we really need a new name for this genre.

After about six hours with Demon Skin, I think I’m done. Overall it’s just too simplistic, and it felt like I was repeating content far too soon. Sure, there are are new enemies and new areas, but ultimately it feels like a samey sort of ride that has players constantly jumping over spikes, battling similar monsters and leveling up basic stats. There’s just not enough new content, story or ideas here that make me want to continue the push to the end.

Demon Skin is a game that tries; it shows potential but fails due to missed opportunities and a lack of refinement. The combat is decent – though it can suffer from movement issues and unfair AI - and the game features good environments, but everything else proves to be a letdown. The story is incomprehensible, with no buildup, engagement or payoff, and the level design features far too many annoying, inexplicable, and often cheap instakill traps. It's not impossible to find some good aspects, but they're fighting a tidal wave of nitpicks and negatives.

Demon Skin definitely needed a lot more work. It’s a buggy mess and a number of features mentioned in the help section or announcement trailers are just straight up missing. At its core, it has a plot they seem to be trying to do something original with, and a combat system that makes blocking more engaging. They could have done so much more, but at the end of the day I cannot recommend getting this.