Demon Gaze still holds up, but its dungeon crawl shows its age

Demon Gaze arrived on the PlayStation Vita in Japan on January 24, 2013, built by Experience Inc. and Kadokawa Games and brought west by NIS America in April 2014. It is a first-person dungeon crawler with a magic eye, a cursed frontier, and a rent bill. Thirteen years on, the aggregate sits at 6.8 out of 10 across six outlets, and that number holds up. This is a game with a real hook and a real ceiling, and it never quite clears the space between them.

Trailer, via NIS America.

Oz and the Magic Eye

You play Oz, a young man who wakes in Mislid with his past under a dark shroud. He has no plan beyond survival, so he takes up arms and hunts artifacts in the labyrinths beneath the world’s western frontier. What separates him from any other adventurer is his magic eye, the power that lets him seal demons.

That power is the whole spine of the game. Oz is a “Demon Gazer,” and the demons he defeats can be summoned back into battle on his side. The demons are part machine, and some of them transform when they go on a rampage. It is a clean loop: kill, seal, summon, repeat.

Five Races, Seven Classes, One Inn

Demon Gaze gives you Oz plus a party you build yourself. Five races, seven classes, and 45 character illustrations in total. You can change a character’s look by “taking a bath,” which is exactly as silly as it sounds and exactly the kind of detail that makes a dungeon crawler feel like home to the people who play them.

Combat is turn-based, with a mix of random and visible encounters. Items can summon monsters at set points in each dungeon, a small mechanic that quietly rewards players who are paying attention to the map instead of just the fight.

The dungeons are only half the game. The hub is the Dragon Princess Inn, where loot becomes rent. You pay to stay, and what’s left over goes into your party. The inn is also where the cast lives — Fran Pendor manages the place and has a secret mission to hand you. Certain conversations with the other residents trigger “heart pounding” cutscenes. Difficulty can be adjusted too, either in specific dungeon rooms or by talking to particular characters.

The World of Mythrid

The setting is The World of Mythrid, split into six regions: the castle of Grimodal, the Old City in its Red and Blue halves, the Slave Graveyard, the Curtain of Star Trees, and the Dragon Princess Inn. It is a lot of proper nouns, and the game knows it. The names do the work of making a small map feel like a large one.

Demon Gaze takes place thousands of years after Students of the Round, the same developer’s earlier game. That gap is felt more in the texture than the plot. You are not required to know the predecessor to follow Oz.

What the 6.8 Gets Right

The issue is not ambition. Demon Gaze knows exactly what it is: a first-person crawler for a handheld, built around a party you assemble and a dungeon you map. The demon-sealing hook is the best thing in it, and the game is smart enough to make that hook do double duty as both story and system. Oz’s magic eye is not a cutscene power. It is the reason you keep fighting.

The problem is that the game rarely pushes past competent. The inn, the rent, the bath, the heart-pounding conversations — these are flourishes around a core loop that is familiar to anyone who has played a crawler before. The 45 illustrations and the difficulty toggles are options, not ideas. And the world-building, for all its six regions and its thousands of years of history, leans on names rather than on anything you actually do in those places.

A 6.8 is the right score for that. It is a good game with a strong central mechanic and a lot of housekeeping around it. If you came to the Vita for a crawler, Demon Gaze delivers one. If you came for the demon-summoning idea to be the whole game rather than the best part of it, you will finish wanting more.

Worth noting for anyone arriving late: this is the 2013 original, not the later versions. An international edition shipped in Japan as Demon Gaze: Global Edition on July 3, 2014. An enhanced version, Demon Gaze EXTRA, came to Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 in Japan in September 2021, with a western release in January 2022, adding HD graphics, a retry system, and the promise of future DLC that expands the post-game. EXTRA reached Microsoft Windows via Steam in April 2022. A manga adaptation illustrated by Kurono began serialization in Dengeki Maoh in December 2013.

None of that changes the verdict on the Vita release. Demon Gaze earns its 6.8 by being honest about its genre and slightly too safe within it. The magic eye is the reason to play. The rent is the reason you keep playing. Everything else is furniture.

Demon Gaze · dungeon crawler · Experience Inc · JRPG · NIS America · PS Vita