Reviewing: Zak Smith's Demon City: The Ultimate Horror RPG

We have another first in reviews today! Just as I've recently reviewed our first horror-adjacent album, so today we're breaking down a ghoulish game—and it's one that's sure to give you a thrill.

Demon City: The Ultimate Horror RPG is a striking tabletop achievement, capturing a unique blend of urban decay, raw chaos, and surreal modern squalor.

For players seeking a game steeped in true-crime inspiration, back-alley grittiness, and psychological horror, this system offers an unusually distinctive approach to the genre. Its setting is deliberately flexible: as the book puts it, Demon City might be Rome, Tokyo, Los Angeles, or practically anywhere else, so long as that place feels like it's coming apart at the seams.

The book itself is an impressive production. Much of the evocative artwork comes from Zak Smith himself, whose distinctive visual style is integral to the game's identity, while Shawn Cheng's meticulous graphic design and additional art perfectly complement the dark, chaotic, and often bizarre tone of the setting.

The result is a book that is enjoyable to browse as well as use at the table, with its numerous charts, illustrations, examples, and visual flourishes giving the whole thing a personality of its own.

What truly sets Demon City apart from traditional tabletop games is its unusual tarot-card-based resolution system. Rather than relying primarily on dice, the game has the Host prepare two tarot decks: a Player deck and a Horror deck.

Cards are used for Throws, which resolve everything from ordinary checks to combat, while the Host also uses the cards and their imagery in creating characters, locations, situations, and scenarios on the fly. A dice-based alternative is included for groups who would rather not use cards.

The basic mechanics are remarkably straightforward. In many situations, what matters is simply which side produces the higher card. Yet the tarot system adds considerably more atmosphere than an ordinary randomizer.

Cards are drawn and revealed together during tense situations, while their suits, numbers, and imagery can also feed into the fiction. The result is a fast, unpredictable style of play in which the physical act of turning over a card becomes part of the horror.

Character generation is another area where Demon City shines. The system replaces the traditional class structure with five Motives—Curious, Friend, Investigator, Victim, and Problem—that describe a character's relationship to the horror they have become involved with.

These Motives provide mechanical advantages and limitations while also giving each character a reason for becoming involved in the investigation. At the same time, they leave considerable room for players to determine who these people actually are.

The game's structural loop keeps players engaged even after the main scenario concludes. Its distinctive downtime system gives mechanical weight to what characters do between investigations and how those activities affect their development.

Whether a character spends the intervening time working, socializing, drinking, exercising, studying, or otherwise attempting to recover from what they've experienced, these choices can affect their progression and relationships. The Contact system likewise makes a character's connections to the wider world an important part of play.

Game Masters—or "Hosts," as Demon City calls them—will find an enormous amount of material within these pages. The book provides extensive advice on constructing and running horror investigations, along with guidance on everything from creating frightening situations to handling maps, atmosphere, voices, and the practical problems that arise when players inevitably do something unexpected. It is less a narrowly defined setting than a toolkit for creating modern horror wherever the Host wants to place it.

That flexibility is one of the game's greatest strengths. The official material explicitly points toward possibilities ranging from True Detective-style murder investigations to Night of the Living Dead-style survival horror, and the game's mechanics are designed to accommodate a wide variety of approaches.

The setting itself is intentionally open, allowing a Host to build a campaign around a familiar city or invent an entirely new one. The extensive tables and prompts provide further tools for generating NPCs, locations, situations, and horrific details when inspiration runs dry.

The sheer amount of material here is truly impressive.

Alongside its core rules, Demon City includes more than forty Horrors, over ninety supernatural abilities, rituals, and spells, extensive advice for Hosts, adventure-building material, and a huge collection of charts and tables. It is a substantial book, and while its basic resolution mechanic is easy to grasp, the game as a whole is considerably richer and more involved than the phrase "rules-light" might suggest.

My final verdict is that Demon City: The Ultimate Horror RPG is highly recommended for any gaming group tired of standard fantasy tropes and looking for a mature, highly atmospheric horror experience. Between the gorgeous visual presentation, the brilliantly unusual tarot mechanics, the flexible Motive system, and the sheer breadth of its urban-horror toolkit, it is a remarkably distinctive addition to any tabletop collection.