REVIEW – “DAMON and BABY” delights in fun, quirky, meaningful ways that make it a must-try

This whole game’s existence has been an exercise in expectation management. When Arc System Works and designer Daisuke Ishiwatari announced this game during the ArcSys Showcase in the middle of last year, people were expecting maybe a new Guilty Gear game, something Blazblue related, or just another cool-ass property that carried similar edge or oddball swagger of those games. Instead, we got DAMON and BABY with a bunch of RPG stuff.

This whole game’s existence has been an exercise in expectation management. When Arc System Works and designer Daisuke Ishiwatari announced this game during the ArcSys Showcase in the middle of last year, people were expecting maybe a new Guilty Gear game, something Blazblue related, or just another cool-ass property that carried similar edge or oddball swagger of those games. Instead, we got DAMON and BABY.

The reaction among much of the greater internet was… tepid to say the least. At first glance, DAMON and BABY was none of those things, but upon deeper investigation it’s so much more. A game where a cool, powerful demon is beset with the burden of being the protector of an adorable child? All right, Pixar is probably trying to find a way to get in on this already with that concept. But wait, you can throw the child as a mechanic to dodge trouble or traverse areas? What is going on here?!

It didn’t take long for DAMON and BABY to show me what it’s got and why I should care. Although the reveal trailer didn’t do much for its concept, it’s a twin-stick shooter big on exploration and light on RPG elements, but they’re there. You level up, dump points into stats, and obtain new weapons to power up, along with a steady flow of other equipables and powers that you find with time. The appealing core of the game is apparent quickly, charmed up by cool characters, funny dialogue, and large areas to uncover. Even the unique font for flavor text you see around the game is cool and intriguing.ver. Even the unique font for flavor text you see around the game is cool and intriguing.

One big way this is like an RPG is how epic it feels. DAMON and BABY goes on a journey in order to tempt fate and find out more about the world like a prophecy that everything seems to dangle by, as well as Damon and the baby themselves. You get quests both mainline and side, both worth devoting some time to. Some are as easy as cooking a few cheeseburgers for a random townie with the help of your Hell Insurance agent angel attached to your side, or going to bop a specific demon in a specific area. RPG stuff!

Maybe it was just the isometric view of the game, but it started to remind me of some classics I used to play back in the day like Landstalker, or other overhead action games like Zombies Ate My Neighbors or Loaded. There’s just this beautiful sense of adventure early on that not only motivates, but quickly endeared the game to me, even if the isometric view was cumbersome at times especially with some platforming.

The game indulges you with two primary systems, combat and cooking. Combat’s done with guns and melee attacks primarily. It’s a kinetic system; you can rush and punch, then pull back and shoot since punching locks you onto enemies when using your handgun. When you’re more fragile or exploring a new area, the desire to hang back and be more cautious by shooting from afar is high, but learning how enemies move and attack gives confidence. Many of the enemies are playing the game as a shooter while you have the freedom to rush down, charge into, and combo them into wall splats and spiraling falls like you’re going for God of Destruction rank on Tekken 8.

Cooking is what keeps you in the fight. All over DAMON and BABY‘s world are tons of foods and ingredients to cook into healing items or ones that nullify negative statuses or give other buffs. You’re constantly finding refrigerators, drawers, filing cabinets, and other things to search and plunder, and there’s a kitchen usually near them. You need recipes to know how and what to cook, but you can find those in the world too, usually in a bookcase.

It’s funny because you find so many things and yet 90% of the recipes you get are for different burgers. Damon could be the Bubba Gump of burgers, I swear. The cycle of getting walloped on, pausing the game and inhaling like, three burgers, then immediately get back to running, jumping, dodging, and performing 84-hit melee combos on a weird demon guy riding a shark is also pretty funny. RPG stuff!

I related to Damon quite a bit. I may not be a demon with untold powers locked behind a corporate-esque ladder climb to Overlord status, but we both have fat, jiggly bodies, like guns, and are caretakers for other humans. He has a sweet emotional arc that I’m sure most people can see coming miles away, but it’s still nice to see unfold. Angels and demons, as we’re told by the game’s characters and lore, are two halves of a whole with angels concerning themselves with the well-being of others while demons encourage more thinking about the self. At first, Damon struggles with the thought of caring about someone outside of himself and his pursuit of power (itself motivated by something deep and personal), but the cast of characters, not the least of which is the eponymous baby, help crack him open a bit.

It’s great to just let the game idle sometimes. You’re treated to the cutest animations from the baby–she reaches out for Damon’s horns, pounds on his back with her little fists, and claps to herself in astonishment. During a couple cutscenes, she punches and pummels Damon’s stomach and engages the jiggle physics in the most adorable way possible. Little mannerisms of playful kids were captured so well with the baby, like the animators put their own kids into her and it just makes me smile. Occasionally she’ll speak, but in limited amounts as she’s just a toddler, but her words always brighten up a scene or make you go “awwwwww”.

The design aspects of this game is what makes it shine the most. The world is vibrant and varied. There’s the types of locations you might expect out of a game like this, but they’re still prettied up and presented in a compelling way that facilitates exploration. You want to see how big the fog-laden town is, or what secrets are tucked behind the huge mall you visit. There’s also a castle at the end of the game that’s so big and vast, I thought we dovetailed into something like Elden Ring or a Castlevania game.

If anything outdoes the world though, it’s the characters. Aside from Damon and the child, your angel helper Tinatana is bright, upbeat, and whimsical with a celestial halo above her. Hanneman is a fellow demon/vampire all about business and as such wears a neat suit with his human disguise. There’s eccentricities everywhere. Slight spoilers, but the Overlord, a representative of Hell that you deal with (not explicitly the ruler like Satan, Overlords are regional rulers), is a large, imposing being with spiked armor and a skull for a head, whereas God in this game is a very unassuming, normal-sized, human man with a scarf and white beard holding a paper bag of baguettes like he just did a grocery run.

Guilty Gear fans may have checked out too early. You encounter a young, chibi-like I-No early on in the game who you trade Memory Shards with to get gifts like weapons and rings to equip. Other ArcSys properties pop up too–I was elated to see an 8-bit portrait of Alex/Kunio from the River City Ransom/Kunio-kun games in many places in DAMON and BABY.

Enemies are incredibly diverse too. The designs are off the wall, from the small trenchcoat-wearing goons to giant demon machines hellbent on turning you to ash and taking the child for themselves, there’s just a lot to shoot at and be shot by. This is another great strength of DAMON and BABY, you simply don’t know what the hell you’ll encounter around corners, and they bring their own charm to the game as well. For instance, there’s an enemy that is clearly a reskin from a previous level, but its banter to you upon encountering it is “I am not a reskin”. Welp, that settles that!

My playthrough lasted around 22 hours and frankly was a blast throughout. Exploring was fun and rewarding, the world was beautiful to look at, the characters and writing had me smiling, even the music added greatly to the package. There’s songs you hear often if you’re warping and backtracking to places when you get new powers so you get intimately familiar with them. They trend more toward ambient and gentle soundtracks, but bolstered by immense and serene synths and pianos. I do wish the music was a bit more consistently presented though. Often I just want to hear the theme of an area as I do my thing, but enemies interrupt with battle themes (which are also good, but still), or if you reach critical health, a more anxious tune to fit the mood will take over.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing though. A quirky game comes with quirky… well, quirks, some intended, some I’m sure aren’t. One wish I had constantly throughout the game was wanting the map to color in with exploration like metroidvanias tend to do. I get wanting to make players find maps to see the area. I’ve been doing that since Super Metroid, but I wished it would stay gray if the area was unexplored, and lighten up when you visit that section. The map is also not 100% correct, not accurately showing where doorways exist on a couple maps so looking around yourself is important!

The loot has some subtle Borderlands vibes in the sense that you get frequent weapons drops from enemies and they’re all permutations on sets (elemental, defense-boosting, faster rate of fire, etc.) or types (the literal weapon type), much of it junk compared to what you’re wielding. You can sell them for money, but I wish you could mark items in inventory as junk to sell, lock them to prevent sale, mark them as a favorite, or at least sort by type or other filters in inventory or your chest where you can store items for later.

For actual sticking points and light annoyances, as fun as it was, combat unveiled some of these for me. Terrain or objects in the world can block shots in busy areas, especially if you’re using a weapon with a wide shot like a shotgun. You’ll want to send a horde of enemies back to hell, but instead your weapon’s bullets will be eaten by the table or whatever’s in your way. Seems like a no-brainer, but it got in the way a lot more than I’d expect and it all depends on the hitboxes of your weapons. I regularly saw my shotgun’s spread nullified by a number of things even when I thought some of the bullets should have gone around. Lock-on is nontraditional as well, requiring you to melee an enemy to activate instead of pressing a button. This takes some getting used to and honestly, since it only works with your handgun, I mostly relied on my right thumb to do the job.

I didn’t start dying until the game’s final two areas, but oh boy did I die a lot. In true Symphony of the Night fashion, deaths send you to the title screen forcing you to reload your progress. No game over menu asking if you want to restart a boss fight or reload a checkpoint, you’re seeing that game logo again. Thankfully, the game loads pretty fast. Speaking of dying, one particular boss later in the game I didn’t die to because it glitched and stopped attacking me mid-fight, which kind of sucks because it was one of the most interesting and challenging ones up to that point.

Lastly, and probably the biggest gripe I had was with the inconsistent auto-save. While I’m a habitual manual saver, there were times I tried to depend on the auto-save and it let me down, either by not triggering where I thought it would, or it straight up failing in a few specific instances. The worst one was beating the penultimate boss of the game and being whisked away to the game’s final area after a cutscene. You’d think it would auto-save, right? Well, I accidentally triggered the final boss before I could manually save, died to it, and had to redo the boss before. After I beat it a second time, the game properly auto-saved before the final boss as I expected. Maybe there is something I misunderstood with this system, but this was my experience. RPG stuff?

I think I deserve an award for likely being the first player to develop a “hard mode” for this game. While there’s no difficulty options in DAMON and BABY, I played through the game without ever finding how to redeem the strength symbols you get, upgrading my hands to wear more rings, or upgrading my handgun until after I beat the final boss. Why? Because I just never came across those vendors, they’re optional, and I could not find a couple maps so I just didn’t know! Still, I beat the game without them, it’s possible, and you can do it too if you wish. If you want to play the game as I’m sure the devs intended or are having trouble in later areas, take more time to explore the shopping mall, that’s all I’ll say.

All of this is a very long-form way to say that DAMON and BABY is absolutely worth your time. Shed your preconceived notion of the game and try it out, with a friend if you want since there’s couch co-op! Most of the issues I have can likely be tweaked with patches if the devs so choose and it’s only $20 which is a wild value for this game even though it’s smaller. It’s still big and fun enough to warrant continued play and getting its platinum trophy, so let’s wrap up this review so I can get back to it, huh?

I’m placing my bet now: DAMON and BABY will be a key cult success this year. It has a lot of heart, a great message, remarkable combat, an enthralling world, funny characters and scenarios, it’s different, and genuinely challenging (especially if you play the game wrong like I did). More than any other game this year so far, this one made me smile the most and there’s great value in that when the times are tough and it’s hard to find other reasons to smile. This game absolutely deserves its time in the spotlight.