The Haunted Hoard: Satan’s Hollow (Arcade)
If you were looking to make an interesting vertical shooter in the 1980s, having interesting enemies was a good way of standing out. Shooting upwards at aliens was all the rage, but when Bill Adams approached Bally Midway with a game idea, he decided to go for a rather bold direction of having the devil be the villain, reasoning that no foe could be a more fitting enemy. And so Satan’s Hollow was born, an arcade cabinet plastered with the face of the devil and with the enemies in game all serving under the Prince of Darkness himself. While the Satanic Panic wouldn’t really flare up until a few years after this game’s 1982 release, walking into the arcade and finding a game where you are meant to kill Satan certainly helped it stand out, perhaps in both good and bad ways. It doesn’t seem like it caused an incredible stir in its time though, and so arcade players were free to shoot down Satan for as long as the game remained popular.
In Satan’s Hollow you play as a large gun positioned at the bottom of the screen, the player free to move it left and right but lacking any vertical movement. Your weapon fires rather rapidly and your movement speed is fairly solid, but what makes the gun a bit more interesting than your typical vertical shooter is its shield feature. The player is able to make a small forcefield appear around their gun briefly to help protect it from enemy fire and if that shield manages to make direct contact with an enemy it will instantly kill them as well, giving it an interesting offensive angle on top of its use in managing damage. A gun will normally be destroyed from a single hit of any kind, but the shield definitely helps with survivability, something the game definitely needed to avoid being frustrating since fairly early waves of enemies area already incredibly aggressive both in the amount of shots fired back at you and how often they’ll dive bomb towards you. Your shield is limited in use, draining quickly if left active but also refilling at a fast enough rate that it can be relied on pretty regularly.
Shooting down your enemies in Satan’s Hollow isn’t just about killing everything on screen though. Your main goal is to actually build a bridge to cross a river of fire to your right, a bridge piece generated each time you kill an enemy unless one is currently in play. The gun must move over, grab the piece from the far left, and deliver it to the far right to build this bridge, and while you can try to stagger out enemy killing to ensure you get the optimal amount of bridge pieces from them, this only really works during the rare calm enemy waves since most of them are packed with so many enemies you’ll be obliterated if you don’t try to keep thinning their ranks. Once the bridge is complete though, you can cross it to head over to a second screen where Satan himself is ready for a one on one fight, hurling down pitchforks as fireballs spin through the air. Satan is actually a fairly easy and somewhat adorable foe compared to the increasing dangers of the regular enemy waves so beating him is usually quickly resolved, and there are some nice rewards for doing so. Your gun will gain additional cannons that allow it to fire more rapidly and you’ll get point bonuses based on how many enemy waves you’ve taken out so far. You will, however, lose those extra cannons on the gun if it dies, but the flags on the mountaintop castle that mark how many enemy waves you’ve beaten will remain an entire play session and continue to provide the point bonuses every time you kill Satan. The bridge does need to be longer after each battle with him though, and there’s a few reasons you probably won’t be visiting him too often.
When Satan’s Hollow kicks off, there’s a group of green gargoyles flying in the air above who look like dragons but the arcade flyer calls them gargoyles. These “gargoyles” breathe fire which isn’t too dangerous unless they’ve dive bombed down towards you, but they also drop rather modern looking bombs you need to avoid. After two waves of fighting a small handful of dragons to ease you in, you have your first run in not with Satan himself, but his giant floating face. Fought alone and appearing every few waves, this version of the devil is probably more dangerous than the full-on version you fight across the bridge, mainly because he breathes a long stream of fire down towards the ground that expands outwards and lingers for a bit. The devil’s face is killed in one hit like everything in the game, but you’ll need to lead your target since otherwise you’d be roasting in the flames below him.
After this ease in though, wave four has 18 green dragons, a red one, and an impish creature flying above you, a stark increase from the first and second level having 8 and 6 green dragons respectively. Bombs start getting dropped in huge amounts, many of the dragons dive bomb down towards you at once, and a few new concerns are introduced with the new enemy types. Enemies can begin dropping rocks to break apart parts of the bridge you’ve already placed or just add more danger to the hailstorm of bombs, but there are new explosive eggs as well that release a briefly lingering fire wherever they land. Enemies also can start flying down below your position to try and snatch away lives, and while you can shoot them down to prevent that life from being lost, it’s a lot of information to track all at once. The next waves that aren’t rematches with Satan’s disembodied head only crank up the chaos as more and more foes attack at once and fly down to try and hit you personally, your shield definitely strained as keeping up with such an onslaught is fairly difficult. Oftentimes success in a wave can come down to how much early damage you deal before all your flying foes attack in earnest, but you can still squeak through with the right maneuvers and shield use so even though the difficulty probably ratcheted up too quickly, it’s not the kind of shift in challenge that makes it feel like Bally Midway is just kicking you off the cabinet for daring to get so far.
Admittedly, it does feel like it can reach that point down the line. As you progress in the game, the spooky scenic cliff side view that serves as the game’s backdrop will start to dim gradually as night begins to fall. The moody reds fading in feels like a nice touch in the same way the occasional playing of “The Ride of the Valkyries” does, but once the sky starts to go black, green dragons turn dark blue and start to blend in a little before the game decides not to be coy and starts making most every enemy black so they can’t really be seen save for their facial features. The dragons’ beady eyes and the small faces of the imps means you’re basically watching small pixels weave through the air and they’re still as aggressive as they were before so effectively wiping out near-invisible foes ends up perhaps too difficult. There is a bit of good news though, the first being that enemy waves will reappear down the line so you will get moments with the slower and simpler early enemy arrangements again before the tough stuff comes up for repeat performances or even new arrangements that are fairly frantic as the game piles in enemies once more. The second nice detail is that pushing ahead through the dark night will eventually cause the light to cycle back into play as well, although the illumination of returning daylight is doomed to fade again eventually. Even leaving the darkness would be fairly difficult already though, so if you manage to see the sun rise again over Satan’s Hollow you’ve already more than proven yourself against a game that perhaps too quickly stops holding back.
THE VERDICT: There’s a delicate dance between players and designers when it comes to arcade games, and the devilishly quick shift from inviting to overly aggressive means the dance is a bit rough in Satan’s Hollow. There are some fun ideas at play, the shield a smart addition to offset the sudden climb in difficulty that comes from piling in so many aggressive enemies at once. The bridge-building adds an interesting extra consideration to the action and battles with Satan, be it his face or full body, are simple but quick enough to serve as nice injection of variety. Once the game is filling the sky with too many enemies to reasonably keep track of things threaten to become too much to handle, but besides the dark skies where you can barely see foes things do mostly remain challenges that are within reach even if they demand a lot from the player.
And so, I give Satan’s Hollow for arcade machines…
An OKAY rating. It is a shame the game eventually leans on practically making its enemies invisible as actually clearing out the waves where things can quickly become out of control provides a fairly satisfying feeling if you can pull it off. Landing those early shots to give yourself breathing room becomes important for those waves and having the less hectic battles with Satan help offset the overwhelming feeling of those packed battles. Cycling back to simpler waves also gives you a helpful breather, and being able to manage your shield or keep the cannon upgrades from the battles with the real devil do give you something to shoot for since the pay off is being able to conquer those chaotic challenges. The game probably should have eased into it better or maybe dialed back how many bombs and dive bombing “gargoyles” can be active at once, but that shield really helps the game avoid being a lost cause. It’s just helpful enough to make handling those absurdly aggressive waves possible but doesn’t turn into a crutch since it can be depleted so quickly, the bridge-building focus helping the game escape being defined only by the need to push through every enemy wave. In fact, the bridge can become a tactic in itself as you can potentially build it and leave it there as an escape route as it both gives you more room to maneuver or can let you just run off to the easier battle with Satan if you’re worried the basic enemies will overwhelm you.
Satan’s Hollow does invite the player in with the opening stages before it gets a little excited too early on and throws out a screen packed with foes, but the tools are solid enough and the bridge-building gives you a goal to shoot for so you won’t be immediately discouraged by the sudden jump in difficulty. Satan’s Hollow can draw in players with its style and play but whether or not it keeps them long would depend on the player being able to develop the skill needed without the smooth difficulty curve that could cultivate such a thing. It is a bit funny that battles with Satan in the game where he’s the main baddy are a relief compared to his scores of servants, but the balance isn’t so skewed that the game is robbed of any appeal. The battle against the forces of the devil himself doesn’t need to be easy, but if Satan’s Hollow wanted to be more than a brief but decent amusement it probably should have focused more on how enemies are positioned rather than so quickly throwing them together in a big group and letting them go wild.