Hell Maiden grabbed my eye with a pretty compelling concept: this is a Vampire Survivors-like retelling of Dante's Divine Comedy, but the story's been gender-flipped to replace the whole cast with anime girls in a '90s magical girl aesthetic, ala Sailor Moon. That was enough to get me to check out the game's Steam Next Fest demo, and after a handful of runs just kept packing on new delight after new delight I couldn't hit the wishlist button fast enough.
If you've played Vampire Survivors, or any number of other games that popped up in the wake of its breakout success, you'll immediately understand the basics. From an isometric perspective, you move Dante – who is, again, an anime girl in this world – around, and every second or so she makes an automatic attack. Endless hordes of enemies roll in, and as you defeat them they'll drop experience orbs you can grab to level up, get new attacks, and upgrade existing powers.
There are two key differentiators in the basic action. First, you actually aim your attacks with a mouse cursor, giving the action more of a twin-stick shooter vibe. Second, you have a dash move that you can use to quickly move past enemies without taking damage. This makes gameplay feel substantially more active and hands-on than Vampire Survivors.
But Hell Maiden's most important distinction is its deckbuilding system. Your weapons come in the form of cards, which sit in a hand that you build over the course of each run. You have four slots for weapon cards, and each of those weapons has a handful of slots for upgrade cards. You might get, say, a card that adds bonus damage, or one that randomly increases or decreases the number of projectiles fired on each attack.
You can combine identical upgrade cards to improve their bonuses, which creates a whole lot of fun decisions along your level up path. Do you want to drop that 30% damage bonus on your new weapon, or combine it with the same upgrade on your starting weapon for a 50% buff? Some cards offer positional boosts based on where they sit in your hand, too, so you'll need to start making hard choices on your loadout when you get cards like the one that offers bonus damage on every weapon that sits to the right of it in your loadout.
The first run or two of Hell Maiden feels a little slow, but as is typical for the genre, once you get a handle on the basics of the upgrade system it's easy to feel satisfyingly overpowered as you melt down hordes of enemies.
You'll immediately figure this out once you see the screenshots on the Steam page, but Hell Maiden is also gorgeous, with lovely pixel art characters, pleasant 2D backgrounds, and gorgeous portraits for the story scenes. I was blown away by the brief cutscenes that accompany your screen-clearing special attacks – each one a beautiful, traditional bit of 2D animation worthy of a magical girl transformation.
Hell Maiden takes a page from Hades with story-driven progression and a bit of dialogue between each run. The writing didn't really hook me, but I appreciate having more traditional progression to provide a hook for successive runs.
I reached the end point of the demo, which covers the Limbo stage, within about an hour of playing, and found yet another delight at the end: a unique boss battle that combines bullet hell projectile patterns and area of effect attacks with indicators straight out of an MMO raid. It was a fantastic final challenge here, and one that's very much whetted my appetite in anticipation of what else the game has in store.
Roguelikes are often a tough sell for me, and I generally only find myself compelled by the very best the genre has to offer – games like Hades and Vampire Survivors. I don't know if Hell Maiden will have the longevity to take its place alongside the best roguelike games, but if it can hook somebody like me in under an hour I'd say it's well worth taking a look at.
