Daimon Blades Is A First Person Slasher Drenched In Blood And Cryptic Mysticism

By Elijah Gonzalez | October 6, 2025 | 12:00pm

Video Games Features daimon blades

Daimon Blades Is A First Person Slasher Drenched In Blood And Cryptic Mysticism

Update: While the pre-release build of Daimon Blades we played featured AI-generated artwork, according to Streumon Studio’s Discord, this has been removed with the game’s Early Access release (1:30 p.m. ET).

E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy is one of those games that earned a dedicated following thanks to its ambitious design, dense world-building, and immersive sim elements, all of which were more or less held together with duct tape. And now, after an extended stay in the world of 40K with Space Hulk: Deathwing and Necromunda: Hired Gun, Streumon Studio is finally returning to the arcane setting they created in E.Y.E. with their next game, Daimon Blades, a co-op extraction “slasher” that has you exploring a shifting temple full of dark rituals and hellspawn.

It just came out in Early Access today, and its central demon slaying feels sharp—I mean that literally, you’ll have a hard time finding many first person RPGs that make your sword seem so dang deadly as you cut through demons, fire imps, big gross spiders, and whatever else the underworld throws your way. It’s also defined by odd, compelling specifics, just like in E.Y.E. Unfortunately, though, that’s not the only thing Daimon Blades borrows from its predecessor, because it’s also very rough around the edges.

Set eons before E.Y.E., you play as a member of the Secreta, a cult of warrior monks whose purpose is to contain the Daimon realm. One day, your former mentor, the Hermit, betrays the order and begins a dark ritual in a previously forgotten Temple with ties to the occult. You play as the warriors sent to stop him before it’s too late.

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Structurally, Daimon Blades is very much inspired by both roguelikes and extraction games: this is a run-based game where you fight through an ever-changing environment. At set intervals, you’re given the option to make a strategic retreat and save most of your loot, or take a bigger risk to win it all. You’ll power up over the course of each run by choosing between different upgrades, and so on.

But while the broad structure of the game is very familiar, the particulars end up feeling obfuscated and more than a little weird, mostly in ways that seem intentional and in some that probably aren’t. While most roguelikes have overarching progression, here, there’s a full-blown leveling system where you permanently bolster your character’s stats to improve their HP, physical attack power, and more. You can also provide sustenance to your supernatural sword with Daimon hearts to gain access to various weapon-specific passive stat boosts. On the one hand, it’s simple enough to figure out how this works once you accidentally stumble into the screen where you can perform these upgrades (which the game does not currently guide you to at all). On the other hand, there are also a bunch of other specifics I haven’t wrapped my head around yet, like how the Daimon that lives in your sword somehow has a relationship status with your character or what this creature’s astrological signs mean for gameplay, if anything (my sword is an Aquarius, by the way).

Daimon Blades

There is a central fussiness to the experience, which is both compelling and sometimes frustrating, but thankfully, most of this fades away when you’re hacking and slashing like the bloodthirsty crusader you are. The first-person sword fighting here is positively grisly, a metalhead’s paradise of occult symbols and viscera that will have you slicing these horrors into slabs of gore. The actual actions you can perform are somewhat basic—left click to slash, middle mouse to launch a spectral projectile, hold right click to block, space to jump, Ctrl to dash, and a few other key presses to use healing items, an ultimate attack, or an alchemy item—but together these result in a fast-paced bloodbath that channels the speed and flow of arena shooters. In terms of gameplay, it almost comes across like a long-lost mod for an id Software game that traded the Doomslayers’ boomstick for a two-hander, as you air dash and double jump your way to gruesome glory.

And most importantly, when your blade hits a Daimon, the results are sick; you’ll break a foe’s guard with vicious blows, leaving them wide open for a gnarly kill shot, or take out a screenful of charging minions with a single well-timed ultimate attack that leaves behind a mountain of gibs. A lot of work clearly went into nailing the feel of the close-range combat, and unlike many first person RPGs where your weapon hit like a pool noodle, this one conveys that you’re wielding a very sharp, very deadly object. Is it a bit aesthetically one-note in that decidedly grimdark, juvenile, heavy metal devil horns kind of way? Sure, but man, it’s really fun to swing that sword at an eyeless creature from an Iron Maiden poster.

These expeditions are also compelling in another way; as previously alluded to, you’ll find a bunch of weird stuff down in these hell pits. You’ll come across prisoners whom you can sacrifice to restore your health, but if you do, a bar called BRAVERY will suddenly appear, and then be gone just as quickly (is this a bug? I have no idea). Sometimes, when you use your blood vials to restore your health, your Daimon will laugh as this “healing” item has the opposite effect, poisoning you. When you get far enough in a run, the Hermit will suddenly appear in a turn-based segment that looks like a fighting game character select screen, curse you with a scroll, and then give you the opportunity to play your own incantation back.

At one point, the objective I received from a magic talking door (which you always need to appease to reach the next area) was to “Snatch treasure, keep ancient gods delighted.” At this point, I skulked through the catacomb while looting everything in sight, waiting for some lightning bolt to strike me down that never came—unlike every other objective I had received, this one involved almost no fighting and gave me a run’s worth of goodies, for no apparent reason.

And perhaps the game’s most important unique mechanic is that death doesn’t end a run. Instead, it builds up something called the Corruption meter, which goes up with every death, and can be increased or decreased by several other actions, like making a human sacrifice (this makes it go up) or slaying a big eyeball (this makes it go down for some reason). At first, all these interactions feel odd and a little arcane, but that mostly feels by design.

Sometimes, though, this oddness does admittedly cut the other way. My least favorite example was a specific objective type that basically functioned as the unlucky counterpart to the previously mentioned treasure hunt. Here, I had to first-person platform my way up terrain that reminded me of something you’d find in a player-hosted lobby of a Source engine game—that is to say, it was very wonky. Unfortunately, if you trip, you’ll fall into a rising pool of lava that instantly ends your entire run; at least playing alone, there was no chance for revival, regardless of your Corruption level, undermining one of the game’s central gimmicks. Even in a game where you’ll be dying to random nonsense quite a bit because you’re playing as a flimsy human surrounded by swords, fireballs, and creatures that explode when they die, at least in those other instances, you can get back up after.

However, that’s just one example of how this experience was uneven, because there’s no getting around just how much this comes across like an unfinished video game (to be fair, it very literally is one). While Early Access titles always vary a great deal in polish, this one seems quite far from release outside of its core loop, with lots of placeholder text, broken menus, and uninteractable NPCs that stare blankly into the void. And although the game thankfully runs at a blazingly high framerate (likely because it isn’t aiming to deliver particularly cutting-edge graphics), I saw severe pop-ins that had me worried I was going to fall through he world. Many of these issues are improved compared to the build from before the game was delayed a month, but there’s still a lot of work to do.

Additionally, while there was a lot of charm in discovering the oddities of this setting for myself, like when I found out that I needed to stab those big, creepy eyeballs to lower my Corruption, or that time I accidentally discovered just how far charged sword strikes reach, there definitely needs to be more forms of in-world guidance besides the barebones tutorial provided. I’m sure much of this is on the way, as the game obviously isn’t done yet, but on the Early Access spectrum of “this game is basically done” to “this needs a lot of work,” Daimon Blades tips a bit more towards the latter.

Another big bummer is that the team is apparently using generative AI for certain assets, which they explain on Steam in the following statement: “As a tiny devteam of 7, with limited resources, we have used generative AI to help us produce more content for you: > Daimon portraits and some icons (each asset have been carefuly curated and tweaked by our Art Director). > Voices (two of us are recording all the voices in house, then we use cloning to change the gender or the tone of the recordings).” Sometimes it is okay to have less “content” if it means this material is made by a flesh-and-blood human and not a regurgitating robot.

Still, though, even with this bad news, its technical issues, and my frustration every time my run depended on hellish first-person platforming, there is a lot of oddball appeal to Daimon Blades. Its central hacking and slashing feels genuinely great, and whether it’s landing a carefully timed parry or letting loose a brutal two-handed strike to slice a foe in half, there is a sense of power, speed, and violence here that matches this blood-drenched setting. While I’ll probably hold off on playing more until it gets closer to a 1.0 release, in the meantime, I hope that Streumon evens out this experience while leaving its idiosyncrasies intact. Better yet, I hope they ditch the GenAI nonsense as well—that’s not very metal.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.