Failure can’t keep a demon-hunting devil lover down. Despite solid reviews, it didn’t find an audience last summer, Grasshopper Manufactur’s Shadows of the Damned may get a sequel according to series composer Akira Yamaoka. Publisher Electronic Arts may even put their weight behind the follow up as well.
Speaking with Eurogamer, Yamaoka said, “I’m thinking of a sequel, actually. I can’t tell you here but clearly I’d like to.”
Yamaoka is the composer behind Grasshopper’s new game Sine Mora and Konami’s revered Silent Hill series. Sine Mora is characteristically strange even for a Grasshopper game. It’s a scrolling shooting game in the ‘80s mold where you fly left to right dodging bullets and taking down opposing planes, but it’s also about sex, time travel, and the cost of war. Right. 2011’s Shadows of the Damned—conceived of by Yamaoka, Grasshopper head Goichi Suda (No More Heroes), and Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil 1, 4)—was equally strange. Part grindhouse satire, part absurdist horror, Shadows was a mix of excellent ideas that stumbled in its execution. The tale of demon hunter Garcia Hotspur trying to save his girlfriend from hell was marked by the idiosyncratic gallows humor of its creators, but felt sloppy and hollow thanks to its claustrophobic environments.
It stumbled at retail as well, selling fewer than 24,000 copies in the U.S. in its first month on shelves. In an era when most games need to sell between 500,000 and 1 million copies to be considered a success for publishers, Shadows doesn’t seem like an ideal candidate for becoming a franchise.
In fact, publisher EA seemed to want to wash its hands of the game as soon as it was finished as the game was backed with almost no marketing. Yamaoka intimated that EA will support the sequel though. When asked if the publisher would back the game, he responded, “Probably. Well, yes.”
