Helltaker Makes Harems Tolerable and I’m Not Sure that’s a Good Thing

We’re living trough a new golden age of free indie games: early this year we got the Haunted PS1 Demo Disc 2021, last month it was Friday Night Funkin’, now it’s Helltaker’s turn .
Don’t get me wrong, quality free games are nothing new (and as a nerdy kid during the horror RPG Maker craze I know this well) but the sheer amount and quality of them now, the variety of styles and genres, along with the larger size of the market held by indies is enough to make modern free games stand as a distinct phenomenon from what came before.
Within the endless tiny games of Itch.io, the Epic store’s freebies of the month and all of our personal pile of unplayed games, what small developers need to stand out is a hint of extreme originality; that spark of life, uncommon in any business. The trouble then becomes that a voice so peculiar, as if synchronized on odd frequencies, can often only speak to few.

More realistically, then, free indie games need a gimmick.
Doki Doki Literature Class had self aware AI schoolgirls, Spooky’s Jumpscare Mansion was spooky, then cute, then terrifying and then cute again while indie classics like Yume Nikki, Emily is away and others all but started their own genre. That’s all well and good, but do they have a demon girls harem? I don’t think so.

With that out of the way, Helltaker is a short puzzle game from solo developer Vanripper, released on Steam for free on May 2020. It has a simple but impactful visual style, confident writing with a memey sense of humour and a soundtrack that’s already more popular than the game itself. Its premise is simple: complete a puzzle room and you are rewarded with a demon to add to your collection; press the “Life Advice” button and instead of a boring, old hint you’ll be greeted with a short conversation where demons roast you while making sexual innuendos.

If you don’t quite like how that sounds, if you can’t imagine any version of this that isn’t an excuse for objectification, if you feel like winning an actual woman to decorate your living room with is a weird reward for playing the game as intended, good news! the developer has some words for you! Namely “But what if they want to join your harem?” And if that wasn’t enough for you, do not fret. Just know that the game will repeat that same excuse every single time you get a new demon. Actually, more like twice per demon.
Helltaker is so worried you might think you’re actually playing a harem game that, if it wasn’t desperately trying to avoid any responsibility, I would say that it was its main theme.

But. If i might speak directly to the dev for a moment. Cerberus the dog-girl pack. Hell yeah.

This obsession to justify the use of the (completely superfluous) harem component is the most baffling aspect of this game, and it sits right at its core. Halfway in my playthrough I took a note to represent the game’s constant reminders of the demons’ inexplicable willingness to join the MC’s harem: “HELLTAKER IS ONLY ABOUT CONSENSUAL SEX.”
I thought it was funny: a subversion of the genre’s unwillingness to give the girls of the harem a voice, an almost trophy way to riff off of an already trophy genre. It’s such a good fit that unironic harem stories have been doing exactly that since forever. Oh no.
So, yes. Autumn 2020'’s indie game darling is a harem game with a vague understanding of why the genre isn’t held in a particularly high regard. It understands it well enough to have itself rolled in a thin veil of irony, to still be, fundamentally, about the harem but, you know, not like those harems. This isn’t a real harem, it’s subversive! It’s ironic! The problem here is that Helltaker, like so many other stories of its time, seems to have conflated irony with subversion.

Here are just some of the tropes that Helltaker repeats, though ironically, while still enjoying the fruits of their intended purpose:
So much time is spent making clear that the girls aren’t forced to join the harem, than the source of their attraction to the protagonist (which appears to be the only man in existence) never even comes into question. The player shares their perspective with the protagonist, making the girls’ interaction with him the only way to develop their character. A characterization that, true to form, is as important to the girls as the way they’re drawn but the extent of their personality barely matches that of the average doll line-up.

That’s not great, sure, But. If i could have the Awesome Demon’s number, that’d be great. I know she’s real, she’s too cool for hell, and my couch unfolds into a bed. Just saying.

Surely this is all a setup, I thought. Seeing how the game ends on a dozen demons trashing the protagonist’s house gave me high hopes, and that’s where I went wrong. The epilogue does shows where the heart of the subversion lies, but just as important is where this subversion comes from: of all of the consequences the protagonists faces none come from ignoring everyone else’s perspective, or from not questioning the root of his senseless quest, or from actually being tricked by the demons (something the game teases constantly but fails to deliver on).

What the game lacks for radical subversion is a re-centering of the narrating voice, a reframing of the action as it happened (or is assumed to happen in the genre) from a perspective different than that of the man who asserts dominance over other men by hoarding women like they’re cattle. What we get instead is the revelation that running a 24/7 party for 11 demons would be pretty hard. “Why would you even want an harem”, says the game, “What if it’s not as hot as you think? What if you have to do all the cooking? Imagine that, a man cooking for his women!”. It never stops smirking, it never changes its tone. Helltaker somehow fails to understand that there is nothing it is more interested in the than the (heavily gendered) relationships within its cast. Even in its secret ending the only non-cute anime girl demon, Beelzebub the Great Fly, turns… she turns into an anime girl. And she’s not even that cute. Average at best, easily in the bottom half.

Along with the framing device, the hint system and the innuendos filled writing, this secret ending too feels, if not tacked on, a bit out of place, as if motivated by a need to tick the boxes on an harem tropes list. And yet, in order to reach this secret ending and Beelzebub the Secret Anime Girl, the protagonist decides to cross a portal to her banished dimension. The rest of the cast, the girls of the harem, outright tell him that this will leave him exiled as well, to just ignore the provocation of the demon and to go trough with the normal ending. They make a good argument but, since he’s controlled by the player, he decides 2 more drawings of an anime girl are worth spending eternity in super hell.

Helltaker, it turns out, does understands the nonsensical nature of the goal it gave you at the start: it saves nullifying your harem related struggles for a secret ending, so that a treat for the player comes to a direct cost to the protagonist. Enjoying one of the two endings to this (very short) game requires the player recognize the difference between their goals and those of the dude on the screen. In conclusion, Helltaker is as good as harem games get. The downside is that now there’s a harem game I like. If it turns out that hell is real at least I’ll know what brought me there.

But. Since that’s already decided. Please transplant my thoughts into the angel girl that’s maybe becoming a demon. I’m looking forward to your next game and all but, you know, angel girl. Get onto that.