Yet again I find myself in a familiar situation. It goes like this: The Squad is discussing what we should play with this past weekend.I bring up Devour. It’s been a few months since we last played it, there were a few maps added since we last played, and we always have a good time with it, so let’s check that out. Then I head over to Steam to make sure it’s still installed, only to find that it’s been 3 years since we last played.

This happens to me all of the time. I have such vivid memories of playing something that I could have only played it recently it but then find it’s been many months or years since the last boot up. All thanks to sorting my Steam library by recent. It used to suprise me. Now I just laugh at how long it’s been this time, if I even remember to check. It’s definetly an interesting personal phenominon. In general, my memory can be, shall I say, lacking at times, in day to day life but apparently I can recall fine details about a video game I played a year and a half ago. Go figure…

Anyway, back to Devour. It remains to be the best $5 I’ve spent on Steam. It’s a co-op, horror game, where you and up to 3 friends collect 10 of some sort of animal to sacrifice to exorsise a demon. As your sacrifices increase so does the monsters level of aggression. There are six maps, each with its own theme and flavor. The original map, The Farmhouse, has you and your team picking up goats and sacraficing them at an altar to stop the demon who chases you around the whole time. It’s fun to watch your friends get scooped up out of nowhere, less fun when it unexpectedly happens to you! Each map offers it’s own challenges and the two newest maps, The Slaughterhouse and The Manor have a few tricks up their sleeves that made our return visit feel fresh.

I’m sure you can already guess the theme of The Slaugherhouse map – It’s a Slaughterhouse!It’s a big, open square area with two levels. At first, we couldn’t figure out what to do because every single door was locked and we couldn’t find any keys to open them or release the pigs that needed captured. That’s a thing on every map, you typically need to release whatever it is you’re sacraficing from a cage that their already in. Seems coutner intuitive…

I eventually found a big square hole in a wall on a whim after running around in circles for 10 minutes. Turns out, this map has some vents to crawl through instead of going through doors. Once we spotted the vents, things moved much more quickly. We found the ritual room with a giant meat grinder. For science, I jumped in to it to see what would happen. I expected to die when I hit the ominous blades but this wasn’t the case. However, the walls of the grinder were just a little too high and I couldn’t jump out of it. Luckily, or unluckily for my unwitting character, Blades and Toast fueled up the ginder and turned it on which downed me! But that just meant I was crawling around waiting for a revive. Much to my suprise, I was able to climb out of the grinder while downed even though I couldn’t jump, not quite sure how that works. Oh, and we also found the guy who would be chasing us around.

After the whole debacle, the doors actually opened and things really started to get going. We found some keys, let some pigs out but couldn’t find the object needed to lure the pigs so we could pick them up. If you just run at them, they run away even though they aren’t very fast, you can’t pick them up with out putting an item down to distract them. The item in question was a bone, a femur by the looks of it, which seemed to only drop from some crawling lesser demons on the ground. Typically, these items spawn around the map and it’s a matter of finding them but tying them to an enemy that had to be killed wasn’t made this a chore. It was hard to find the enemies and there weren’t enough of them around to find them quick enough to deal with the increasing difficulty after every sacrifice.

One of the cool things about this map was when you got caught by the monster, you spawned under the map in a small area with a bunch of traps and some of the crawling enemies. After a little trial and error, we figured out that you didn’t respawn back into the map with everyone until you killed the crawlers. This means your teammates can’t revive you until your back on the map. Writing it out, it sounds like it would be kind of annoying but it was fun seeing how fast I could kill the things and avoid the traps to get back into the game.

We got to five out of ten pigs before we all died and called it quits on that one. I do wonder if it would have been better with one extra person. We were only running with 3 people. Perhaps another person would have made finding the crawlers easier.

Next up was The Manor, which was a big ol’ house with “grounds” around it. There was going to be a wedding but the groom died and the bride tried to summon a demon to bring him back. That – didn’t go well and she was possesed instead. On this map we were tasked with finding….heads….yeah heads and reattaching them to the corpses in the graves around the house. Fun times.

This one was more interesting than the slaughterhouse and is a bit of a departure from the previous maps in general. The ritual is much more involved. The heads are, uh, well they’re crawling around in a mirror world…and they want…cake. The steps are as follows: find the cake in the real world, go into a mirror and find a head, lure it with some cake, then take it to a basin to drown it in, which then turns it into a normal head, then find the matching body for said head in the graves outside, and finally, burry the body. That’s one sacrifice!

This map definitely made us think and come up with some new new startegies. Our usual strategy is to do mutiple sacrafices in a row to decrease the amount of time we have to deal with the monsters aggro. But that doesn’t work on this map because there is only one shovel to complete the final step of burrying the body. However, you can gather up a bunch of heads before hand. It seems like the max is five before they stop spawning in the mirror world. But there are crows in the real world who will pick up the heads and move them to random places so you can’t put the heads next to the matching grave and chain bury them one after another. We ended up putting all of them in the shed and have one person fend off the crows.

It lead to a much more intense experience as we had to fight off the monster multiple times and it just got worse as we burried more bodies. In the end we made it to six out of ten heads before we were all downed.

Out of the two maps, I think we could complete The Manor if we spent more time on the map learning where things are. Again, I think another person would have made a big difference but it looks doable with three.

For a $5 game, I’m suprised they’ve managed to put out so many maps, what looks to be about one a year. I was even more suprised to see that another map is coming this year with a carnival theme. We will be back from that one for sure.