In the demo for Succubus you eat a fetus for hit points

Here are some of the things I did in the hour I spent playing the demo for Succubus. 

  • Tore a baby out of a woman and drank its blood.
  • Punched off a man's jaw, ripped off his dick, then stomped on it.
  • Watched a man feed his own excrement to a big-headed, demonic child.
  • Kicked "martyrs" into spikes.
  • Took a bath in blood using hellbugs as sponges.

Succubus is a spin-off of Agony, the horror game set in Hell released by Madmind Studio in 2018. Unlike Agony, which was mostly about avoiding combat, this is a full-on action game complete with a wheel of weapons and power, a rage meter, and a kick like the one in Dark Messiah only not as good. You play Vydija, a "demonic priestess of lust" out for revenge on the demons who wronged you.

Some of the time between kicking people into spikes is spent climbing. It's like a quicktime event without the time limit, telling you when to press W and when to press D, but sometimes there's no input presented and you have to mouse around to find a more distant handhold, then left-click to leap to it. It's not much fun. There's no way to fail, and no fall damage even if you walk off ledges.

The combat itself is nothing special either, with your blades lacking any sense of impact as they hack up demons and tortured souls. It's hard to judge the distance on the kick, and the glow attached to your foot doesn't make up for how weedy the animation looks. You can press spacebar and W to charge forward, then chain into a kick for a slow-motion attack that sends multiple enemies flying. That bit's all right.

Everything about Succubus is basically an explosion at the edgelord factory, from the terrible dialogue delivered by chainsmokers to the way it labels a pregnant woman a "first aid kit" then makes you rip out her fetus for hit points, to the... look, just imagine me gesturing at literally everything else about this game. 

Succubus is available on Steam and GOG.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.