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Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered resurrects a game that fuses several legendary names into one particularly bizarre and brash third-person shooter. The 2011 original brought together Killer7 mastermind Goichi ‘Suda 51’ Suda, Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami, and Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka. The game that resulted bears striking aspects of all its creators, making it a rather unique prospect – and one unashamed, even excessive, in its bawdiness in a way that is certain to split opinion. At Gamescom, I asked Suda and Mikami what made them want to bring it back now, and if more might follow.
When it first came out in 2011, I had a fantastic time with Shadows of the Damned. It put a faster-paced arcade spin on some of the best survival horror games, such Mikami’s own Resident Evil 4, and supplemented that with enough atmosphere and set dressing to carry it. The jokes didn’t always land – indeed sometimes they were actively grating, even at the time – but there was a charm to its relentless brashness. It’s been a long time since then, however, and our Shadows of the Damned Hella Remastered review questions whether it’s really worth bringing back from the grave in 2024.
In fact, Suda tells me he and Mikami had “wanted to do this for a while” – about eight years ago, he spoke to the game’s original publisher EA about the possibility of a remaster, but the company wanted it to be made exclusive to its Origin storefront. “That kind of defeated the purpose of a remaster,” he explains, noting that the team wanted “to have as many people as possible play the game.”
The idea of a remaster was revitalized “a couple of years back, right around the time we joined the NetEase group,” Suda continues. By then, EA’s exclusivity mandate was “no longer an issue.” He also adds that part of his desire in remastering the project was to create “a catalog of Grasshopper titles, keeping them playable, not letting them get lost to time,” as seen with 2016’s remaster of his debut game, The Silver Case.
Suda had two specific requests for the remaster. The first was the introduction of a carry-over New Game Plus mode, something absent from the original (and which I likely would have welcomed at the time). The other is additional costumes – in particular a demon variant of protagonist Garcia Hotspur.
“In the original, we wanted to include some kind of element where Garcia, as the game progresses, would become more and more demonized,” Suda remarks. This ended up not making the final cut, but now gets a nod in the remaster – albeit only in a purely cosmetic form.
As I mentioned earlier, Shadows of the Damned is a weird game, and one that’s inherently likely to drive some away with its sheer crudeness. That was already true in 2011, and it’s only more so now as players become more thoughtful about the media they consume. Hotspur and his skull companion Johnson aren’t nice people, and they don’t have a lot of – if any – nice things to say about those they encounter. It’s also simply relentless in its delivery of boner-related jokes to an extent that melts into a sort of crude background noise a few hours in as you become numb to the repetition.
Despite this, as I noted above, I have a soft spot for Shadows of the Damned. I’m a gameplay guy at heart, after all, and I was rather taken by its more stylish-action spin on the Resident Evil formula, along with its striking environmental design and the use of light and dark mechanics. That was 13 years ago, however, and we’ve come a long way since then. So how would Suda and Mikami recommend new players approach Hella Remastered?
Suda says one way to enjoy the remaster is “to think of it as a sort of glowed-up indie game that’s just got a bit of a booster.” He also notes that if you like Grasshopper’s games in general, then you’ll probably like it anyway – although in that case, I suspect you won’t need Suda to tell you that.
“It’s a classical, retro punk-horror action game,” Mikami says. Suda, meanwhile, considers it “an adult version of Super Mario Bros – you’ve got the love triangle with the three main characters. Garcia would be Mario, Paula would be Peach, and Fleming would be Bowser. It’s just a bit more grown up.”
“As long as the gamers out there like the game and appreciate what we did, then that’s good enough for us. Clearly it’s not exactly the most serious game,” he continues, “there’s a lot of screwing around and weirdness to it, but that’s the way we wanted it. So we’re looking forward to seeing people react to it.”
“There’s a lot of parts to it that I feel would seem kind of new and refreshing to modern day players,” Suda says. “For example the tempo of the action and the weirdness of it. I think there are a lot of people out there who might not realize it until they actually try, but would probably really, really get into the game and really dig it. Also it’s relatively cheap – it’s just under 25 bucks – so I feel it’s a pretty good deal.”
So with this out in the world, what’s next for the pair? Mikami, without hesitation, reiterates a statement he’s made in interviews previously: “I want to make Killer 7 again.” Suda, meanwhile, wants to return to Kurayami (a name that translates to ‘Darkness’), the original project that ended up turning into Shadows of the Damned.
Kurayami would have seen players exploring a fantastical town and castle, using a torch to illuminate the world around them, a mechanic that seems to translate pretty clearly to the light-and-dark systems that we got with Shadows of the Damned. If you’re curious, you can also read more from the pair about which other games they’d love to bring back – although Mikami is done with survival horror for now.
Shadows of the Damned Hella Remastered is out now on Steam, priced at $24.99 / £19.99. You can find it right here.
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