Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark is a 2D-pixel action-adventure game developed by INTI CREATES. The story centers on two cute demon maids who return from a strangely approved vacation back to their master’s castle and return to their maid cleaning duties. However, a great evil assaults the keep, killing many of their friends, including their very own master Lord Maxim.
Kirko, and Masha, our two maid heroines then find out that it was their very own Headmistress Maid who planned and schemed for this to happen with the great Demon Lord Lyzenorg. Now with everyone in their home castle dead, it is up to the two maids to get things back to normal.
Exploring regions for the spirits of their friends, collecting bones of their Master, and putting a stop to the Demon Lord Lyzenorg is a lot to ask of two humble maid demons. Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark turned ended up one of the greatest metroidvanias made in recent years. Find out in more in our Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark review!
This is a review coupled with a supplemental video review. You can watch the video review or read the full review of the below:
Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark
Developer: Inti Creates
Publisher: Inti Creates, PQube
Platforms: Windows PC (reviewed), Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: March 26, 2025
Price: $29.99
Masha and Kirika are an absolute dish to enjoy. The former is a green-haired small-chested girl who knows her way around a whip and various naturally imbued magics.
Through the use of sub weapons, she tends to lean more into raw summoning magic like creating armored spiders to bully around with her whip melee attacks, which in turn slam into enemies for some comical yet high damage results.
Kirika on the other hand, is a much more ranged-focused fighter, wielding the trusty “checkmate” sub-machine gun fashioned like an Uzi, she enjoys fighting from a distance at the cost of doing much less damage. However if combined with a dodge, she fires a shotgun instead for close range and packs a pretty nasty punch.
Unlike her colleague, Masha’s sub-weapons tend to be mostly objects that are thrown such as bombs, grenades, and the like. Each maid seems to have weapons unique to them. There are more weapons that can be shared by either of them, like a lantern to light completely dark regions and typical weapons like swords and throwing daggers.
The combat and implementation of these weapons and tactics are precisely what one would expect from any Castlevania or metroidvania-inspired game. Excellent, responsive backstepping and forward dashing to avoid being hit by enemies while also doing these motions offensively will feel natural and an extension of the body.
The controls do their job with no questions asked. Killing enemies feels great as every slash and hit is usually followed up with loud bloody splashes of gore. It will hypnotize the player with the need to always clear every enemy in each passing room!
Where Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark truly surprises, is none other than its co-op feature for up to two players. This adds an entirely new layer of being able to traverse through the game by being able to carry a friend on their head as a stepping stool to reach higher regions.
One other feature to note during co-op play is that a player can at any time turn into a bat and safely hover near their counterpart and follow them. This was an absolute boon playing with my wife as she dislikes platforming, and I was able to do those segments for her.
Bat-form can be used tactically to avoid certain hazards and attacks. Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark is a co-op experience I recommend to anyone they have been starving for some good tandem experiences with a friend or loved one.
Delving further and further into the game’s main story, more spirits of the castle’s inhabitants will be discovered, allowing for more features to become available to the two maids. One particular feature involves a large spider blacksmith with the ability to affix passive abilities from one weapon to another.
The blacksmith was quite a delight to invest time into as there are seemingly quite a lot of possibilities as well as tinkering one can do with the maids when messing around with the various options.
Increasing the ammo capacity of Kirika’s gun and adding elemental properties, or if one enjoys punishing themselves, detrimental passives like doubling the cost of using sub-weapons are available purely for added challenge.
While enemies don’t provide the traditional sense of “experience points” when they are defeated, they do have a chance to drop Lord Maxim’s bones. These bones are needed to return to his castle’s throne in hopes of bringing his body back together.
When a certain number of bones are returned, it will level up both Kirika and Masha. At certain milestone levels, they will also gain new abilities like the double jump or being able to swap and take hits for each other. I found this a very unique and exciting way to level up for a Castlevania-like game.
Maxim Bones don’t always drop, so it makes “farming” kind of inconsistent if you want to grind out your strength. When a bone does drop from a monster, it feels exciting to get one every time they do.
Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark is a game that isn’t afraid to go to certain places with its character designs. One boss I battled fairly early on allowed me to attack her large boobs for damage. It was my favorite highlights not just from the game, but probably from what I’ve experienced from any game in a while. It’s truly a breath of fresh air being able to play a game that can express itself however it wants and I’m all for it.
There was one very strange issue though that I had during the adventure, it would have to be the fast travel system. Karon provides a service to move the player about the world to other Karon locations, but not only is this service fairly pricey, they seem to be located in the most obscure and stretched-out areas possible.
There didn’t seem to be one anywhere in the main castle hub which perplexed me as any time I needed to return to the castle, I would essentially have to travel very far to continue where I left off. The only way to level up is to go back to the castle throne. This became rather strenuous to deal with, causing me to not want to return for long amounts of time.
Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark is an absolute hidden gem in all ways possible. In a rather vast, large sea of metroidvanias out there, including my most recent review of Ender Magnolia, it’s very hard to push this genre’s bar of excellence further with how high it already is.
I can confidently say Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark is consistently amazing. The utterly lovable two protagonists complement each other with their polarized personalities. The clever yet sometimes perverted humor never fails to make me smile or laugh. The perfect and responsive 2D-pixel platforming gameplay and great co-op implementation make this cleaning a job a hard one not to recommend.
Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark was reviewed on PC using a code provided by PQube. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here. Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark is now available for PC (via Steam), Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.
