“Devil Jam is a top-down survivor roguelite where you play a rockstar wielding up to 12 weapons at a time to fight off hordes of monsters. Choose from a variety of items to create unique builds and survive until the end.” – Steam Description

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Devil Jam is a musical themed twist on something like Hades or Death Must Die. You start off as Falco, lead guitarist for a band that was just starting to make it big when Death claims them, sending their souls down to Hell where the impeccably dressed ruler of the flames awaits. The Devil recruits Falco and eventually his two bandmates, Amy and Lydia, to help stop Death. The Devil views Death as some sort of a business rival, sending the player battling their way through 20-minute runs, culminating in a battle with the Reaper.

Instead of Hades gods, you have the 7 deadly sins along with the Devil himself, cleverly disguised as a Record label Owner, which honestly? Makes sense. Lust uses debuffs, Envy poisons, Sloth slows, and so on. As you use their abilities and complete their quest board you can unlock more ability offerings from each sin.

As you collect enough experience, you gain a level and one of the above Sins let’s you pick 1 of 3 options to improve your build. The part that sets this game from others is that you slot your abilities on a grid shaped after a guitar fret board, and each beat the weapon or ability slotted activates. There are also abilities that can impact the weapons/attacks on the board but they are in set positions, for instance an ability may affect only things in the 3rd row, or in an x pattern across the grid.

After each run you are sent back to the hub, the Devil’s Club. From here, you can buy meta progression upgrades, purchase currency that you might be missing from your runs to buy meta progression or change your character. You can also speak with the Devil to complete your quests on the quest board similar to the style that Halls of Torment uses in their system, and if you preemptively completed a quest before unlocking the ability to complete the quest, it still counts when you do unlock it. The Devil is surprisingly forgiving but I guess our souls are pretty special.

• Graphics– The art is great. I love the design of the sins. The graphic and art design of the gameplay took a little bit to grow on me, it felt a little like a flash game at first. I think that I was just being harsh as I came to like it towards the end of my time with the game and most importantly, in this genre, you can tell what is happening on the screen with your abilities and the enemies.
• Gameplay– The gameplay loop was a little frustrating at the beginning, you are forced into a repetitive loop of dying at the first 7 minute boss if you get unlucky. The mini bosses you fight are randomized a little, so if you get the “harder” one to deal with before you have meta progression or a build, you just get to lose. At least, that’s how it was at launch. Supposedly it was fixed and I had enough meta progression when I came to the game to stomp over it with ease. The runs start to feel the same though as your builds become very “this is the strong one” and you’re punished for experimenting sometimes.
• Sound– The soundtrack is good which you might expect from a musically themed game where you attack on beat. However during long play sessions the music started to wear on me, I think it’s much better in smaller bursts, a couple runs at a time. Which, the game IS steam deck verified so maybe I was just playing it wrong being on PC for 4 hours at a time.
• Controls– Controls are standard for this genre, WASD to move, spacebar to dash, attacks are auto aim or you can choose to aim. I don’t know why you would, my goal in these games is to build a build strong enough where I can take my hands off the keyboard.
• Story– There was a patch that added a story update where the Devil explains to each character their deal and why they should want to kill Death for him. If you played this prior to January 02 when the story update came out, you would have missed this.