Played it 1° and 2° Stage
and found amazing i look foward for new updates. ❤

I got done trying the demo out and I LOVE this.

This is a future get for me, Even the 1st stage on Demonic was fun

Thank you for this awesome game. Love to see REFMAP in a shmup.

This is now my favorite shmup game. And it is also the second one (besides Tyrian) that i actually finished. Though the last level in the campaign nearly drove me crazy... i loved it.

I had this game for 2 years sitting in my library without playing it. I really should have played it earlier.

I come from the Touhou school of shmups, so it took a little while getting used to. it But I love just about everything about Demonizer. The music, how easy it is to get new bombs, the variety, hell I love the lore too. The difficulty on Normal is firm enough, can't wait to have my butt sent to Hell on Hard next time. I liked the part where Amy proves to the priest just how much she'd rather die instead of her Mommy, but the priest just doesn't have it.

I first tried the Android version, but honestly the controls just don't give the game justice. But I'm not sure how it can be improved - moving around in focused mode only is very limiting. Amy doesn't fly all over the screen on desktop, but that's okay, the game really shines there.
 
If only there could be more content~! Like a super long, super brutal Extra Stage for example.

Also, really appreciate having a DRM-free version. Extra thanks for that, and thanks for the game.

Thanks for the update, and for making this game in the first place! This game is excellent.

This game was quite cool ^^ 

This game is very charming, and has a lot of old-school arcade fun. I like the whole thing a lot, but the gameplay has been very up and down so far. I have a lot of experience with bullet hell type games, but for some reason I can't seem to get the hang of this one. I'm playing through it on normal, and I thought I would have finished it by now. 

I will echo some other reviewers here in saying that it's just really unforgiving, especially in the later stages. I lose my point of reference on my character very frequently against the background and swarms of enemies. There are times I'm doing well and having a lot of fun, and there are times where I feel the game is actively trying to ruin it for me. It's satisfying to beat a stage, but frustrating to struggle all the way through one just to die as soon as the boss intro cutscene is over.

 If I spent more time memorizing enemy formations and bullet patterns, maybe I'd be performing better-- but I don't really enjoy that kind of play. In terms of constructive feedback: more checkpoints really would help. The extra checkpoints could even be a feature exclusive to the normal difficulty. 

Your mileage may vary. I think the game's definitely worth your time. Personally, I want to know what happens in the story. I just don't know if I'll be able to get past the frustration to find out how it ends. 

Thank you Iori, for supporting Ukraine. :)

Picked this up about 3-4 months ago during a special sale and I'm disappointed in myself for not playing it earlier. This is a really fun SHMUP (keep your eyes out for the secret character). Glad more people will get to try this out due to it being bundled with the Bundle for Ukraine.

Good Bullet hell for play on mobile!

This game has nice music, I just wish there was a way to buy the sound track. Or a sound test menu in-game.

As a touhou player for ~2 years who ever got only 1cc in easy mode, I definitely love this game. The difficulty is pretty well dosed for me, the world overall really seems personal, as someone else said : There's no feeling of "I made that cuz it looks badass but idk what I'm even doin"

The major weak point I would point out would be the contrast between background and projectiles. The palette restriction makes it that I sometimes lose focus from my character because its color blends more or less with the other elements. For some reason, the animation of the road on highway also steals part of my attention away from projectiles, but the color issues overall will probably not be a problem anymore once I'm more familiarized with the game.

Besides, I love the palette restriction at the end, and the music (Megadrive VRC7? Idk) definitely fits well. Plus, it's made with Lõve, so thumbs up >:D

EDIT : Went back into it after a few days an yeah, the highway boss is definitely a cut above the previous ones... Throwing 3 bombs at start can't even get rid of half the 2 side units. Definitely requires training and a near-perfect knowledge of the stage, but it definitely looks possible >:D

I really *want* to love this game. I tried it after picking up the Ukraine bundle and it really is extremely charming. But it's entirely too hard for me to continue after an hour of playtime.

As a casual player I could only make any progress with a constant stream of vitriol about unfair it was and restarting every time I got hit, and even then I hit a brick wall at Cave level. There weren't any levels I could finish without dying and losing most/all my power-ups, and despite really liking the aesthetic and being really interested in where the story was going, there is no way I'll find out. 

As someone else suggested, an easy mode with unlimited lives and continue where you died would make it possible for me to see the story without being in a state of constant anger that drives my SO out of the room. I'm not really interested in flying through levels without enemies - I'm here to play a shooting game -but your normal mode requires memorizing the level layout, enemy placement, enemy behavior, bullet patterns, etc. I can't look at where I'm shooting and keep an eye on my character to dodge bullets at the same time, I just haven't got the shooting game chops and this game discourages me from developing that skill by being inordinately hard from the start, and only going up from there.

Ironically you already have an easy mode implemented in "Single Stage" mode, in that I can start with extra lives or power-ups, from any checkpoint and even at the boss. But I can only play levels I've already been to in this easier mode, which is a catch-22, seeing as I'm not good enough to get to the next level to unlock it. If there was a way to unlock all levels, this would also aid casual shooter fans that would like to enjoy your work. [but it seems story isn't enabled in this mode] [alternatively just having an option in Retry prompt to retry with power ups and lives]

On another note, I'd really appreciate some accessibility features:

• option to toggle off screen effects 
  • there's some kinda screen blurring effects?  like this priest boss that swoops up to me and bops me and the whole screen blurs? I have idea no idea what's happening there, and it was both visually ouch and just very confusing.
• similarly in the inebriator mode, which I find very cute and fun, the "drunk" screen effect is headache inducing for me
  •  an option to toggle that screen effect off - the controls getting weird is enough handicap for me
  • I understand that the drunkenness is kinda the point, and the screen effect is a large part of that, so sure, leave it as default and mark that setting as intended experience, but personally I find games that insist on physically hurting me for longer than 3 seconds to be unplayable.
• option to slow down gameplay
  • for those of us that are bad at shooters or with cognitive/motor issues, this would greatly improve the accessibility without changing your level or other game design choices
• Overall, these guidelines are very helpful, and you may find even more features you might add
  • https://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/

I've suggested a number of ways you could make this game easier, because I really want to love it and see the ending, and any or all of them could make this game accessible to me. You've pitched it as "beginners, enthusiasts, and experts can all enjoy" but I wouldn't say this is true in it's current state, unless you count playing halfway through one level as enjoyment. 

As an indie dev myself, I can imagine that this feedback isn't fun to read, or that you might not have the resources to implement any of these features and that's fine. I'd like to tell you I'm still glad this game exists, and I look forward to your future creative endeavors. Thank you for all your hard work, and for offering this game in the bundle in service of such a good cause.

this gave me the biggest, dumbest grin playing through it and i highly approve

Really enjoying this game... Feels very personal, like you put a lot of your soul (& kinks lol) into it. good shit pal.

Your game is slick bruv.

CAVE’s stream team played Demonizer! They really appreciated the little nod to them in Stage 4.

My best score for now:

Demonizer is RFGeneration’s Shmup Club game for March! Visit their forum thread to discuss and participate.

March 2021 Shmup Club - Demonizer

A few words from RFGeneration on their selection:

When shooting games started out in the late 1970’s, everything was done by small teams, engineering solutions, designing arcade hardware, and coming up with fun game concepts that were easy to pick up and play, but hard to master. As the 1980’s shifted from arcades to home consoles and the market diverged, game design teams grew in size, and games became more complex. With the advent of more powerful arcade hardware and consoles in the 1990’s, shooting games became even more complicated, with high production values, and involved scoring systems. Fast forward 25 or 30 years, and shooting games have shifted again, back to smaller design teams, and small indie studios, but often retain higher production values due to more readily available tools for small developers to see their visions come to life. That brings us to game developer Iori Branford, and the recently released, indie shoot-em-up, Demonizer, which takes cues from many 90’s shooters, but has a decidedly old-school look and feel.

Join the RF Generation Shmup Club in March 2021, as we take on humanity in Demonizer!

This has come a long way since I last played last summer. Thanks, this is awesome!

This is genuinely great.

It's somewhere in style between Raptor: Call Of The Shadows and Tohou, and it innovates on the shmup style in a number of interesting ways. Enemies take cover. Environments are cluttered and destructible. There are a lot of elements packed into the (relatively) short game that made me think and strategize more than I'm used to when playing a shmup.

It *is* a bullet hell, and you're probably going to want to use the mouse for it, but also your sprite is large and can get kind of cluttered with allies, so screen clearing is a bit more effective than dodging.

Story-wise, there's clearly a plot, and there's some animated cutscenes, but the narrative isn't so much what you're here for. Monsters oppressed. Humans oppressive. I don't dislike the worldbuilding Demonizer is doing,  but it's either too present or not present enough. The campaign mode's neat, but I felt like there was some backstory I was supposed to have read for it to have hit home.

Other than that, my biggest complaint about Demonizer is kind of just a complaint aimed at shmups in general. It has win-more mechanics. As you eliminate enemies, you gain blue and red hearts. Blue hearts increase the power and width of your beam. Red hearts add sidekicks. Both have the potential to go away when you take a point of damage---they scatter like sonic's rings, and you have to retrieve them without pathing yourself onto another bullet in the process.

In early stages, you can recover from this. There's enough low-level mobs that you can kind of figure out how to ramp up before the damage sponges and pellet-spammers start showing up. In later stages though, oof. Especially with things sometimes hitting and killing you without it being clear a) what hit you, or b) why it killed you. For example, burning patches on the ground seem to kill you, but only sometimes. And only some types of burning patches. Also water sometimes damages you for flying over it, with no visual indication as to why.

I'm not especially good at these types of games, so if you're a veteran your mileage will absolutely vary, but to me Demonizer felt like something you play through in one successful run or not at all. And so to that end, I kind of wish it had some RPG mechanics stirred in. If you could spend your exp at the end of each stage to upgrade, and you could keep your upgrades, dying once during a stage wouldn't mean having to instantly reset your run.

Still, even with its difficulty, Demonizer is a lot of fun to play. The controls handle well. The visuals are interesting. The enemy patterns and tactics as neat as heck.

It's definitely worth checking out, and I'd love to see a follow-up.

daaaaaamn, exactly like old nintendo games, our generation grow up with these kind of games, niiiiice work. the music , the art is just like them

This is wrong. I can understand the complex morality and go beyond the old "people are good/monsters are evil" framework, but this game suggests we just do wrong things. "Capture soldiers to harvest their spirit energy or transform them into allied demons"this is completely unfair to humans as a species. Such things and forced to drink a sedative

Gave it a few runs through there using the touch pad control on a macbook air 2013. I love the artstyle and feel like youre going for a kind of early final fantasy kind of feel which i think is great. I know its still early so my criticisms will most likely be polished by then, of course music and the players bullets are a tad too loud but thatll all smooth out with the other sounds coming in. Loved the patterns and the general theme of arrows etc. I like how the hit box only appears while shooting, id keep that in. I know saying all the stuff i like is probably not as helpful but i really like the power ups how its transparent characters around you thats such a nice touch. I would defo buy a full polished version of this on switch. As much as i enjoyed this/will enjoy the full version im actually looking forward to the sequel more as odd as that sounds. I think this could be a great hit. 

Me encontre este asombrozo juego el otro dia mientras miraba mis opciones en wooveit. Usualmente busco juegos de Nintendo Switch pero este me llamo mucho la atencion y tuve que hacer un video. Aqui les comparto un enlace a mi video por si lo quieren ver y escuchar mi opinion. Ojo yo no soy un profecional solo hablo lo que pienso. Si me gustaria ver este juego en la Nintendo Switch, pienso que mucha gente lo jugaria en esa consola.

I'm interested in these kinda game but haven't got into this genre. Because of that I figured out to get into this kinda genre with this game. Maybe for noob of this genre this game might be too hard. Or it's better to experience hard games of genre to get into same genre? But either case even if it's hard it was fun. And probably I need to replay same level as much as I needed. With which could I have learned enemy and bullet patterns to be able to avoid them. 

Also I mostly was focusing on destroying enemies, maybe I needed to focus mostly on avoid bullets. 

I played Android version and was wondering if with keyboard it will be different. How little I tried I didn't find difference between touchscreen and keyboard... Ok maybe one which is that on touch your finger might block seeing where your character are. However to move character on touchscreen you don't hold screen where it is character. Finger can be under or over character and with that you will able to tell how close or far bullet it is to you. 

And there isn't difference of game screen aspect ratio between different platform. Only resolution but it can change between same platform. 

But like I before wrote it was enjoyable even when it's hard. I guess who are interested to see how bad I played there here is video of it: