First days at school don’t come weirder than this.
One of the best things about indie game developers coming into prominence over the last few years has been the number of wacky, completely out there titles we’ve seen getting a digital release which we’d have been really unlikely to get as Nintendo fans in the past. Super Daryl Deluxe is a game that you won’t forget for a while, and fits into that category.
The game just has bags of personality, from the hand-drawn graphical style to the hilarious writing which hits the mark far more often than it misses it. Main character Daryl is on his first day at school, and as the social outcast type, he’s made to do all kinds of weird things in order to win over some friends for himself. Daryl looks gangly and awkward, making him an unlikely protagonist, and there’s an air of absence to his personality which extends his oddity further.
It’s a difficult game to categorise – it’s part 2D platformer, part RPG and part beat-em-up, with Daryl wandering around the school in search of items for the main part before taking in levels with enemy monsters of varying difficulties. The hand-drawn bits are juxtaposed with real-life images of people’s faces and other visual styles which make the game feel like a mix-and-match finished product made up of stuff that was left on the cutting room floor from other games, but it works. While the visuals vary from the mundane to the weird, the music does maintain a great standard throughout.
Missions will send you off to fetch items or tackle enemies, while side-quests can be picked up from secondary characters throughout the school. Celebrities from the real world are randomly dotted around the place – Beethoven in the theatre section, and Death is up in the clouds behind the school. Odd.
Throughout the game you’ll amass different skills which can be assigned to any of four different buttons, and you can use them in the combat sections. They can be levelled up and upgraded as you collect money from enemies and textbooks which are dotted around the place and can be swapped in and out as you please. They need to be used tactically though, as they each have an individual recharge time when used, so as you’d expect, the ones which do the biggest damage are the ones which you can use most infrequently.
Despite the control over skills, when a lot of enemies are on the screen it was disappointing that combat felt like a button-mashing exercise over anything else. There didn’t seem to be any sense of finesse when hitting each of the four attack buttons continuously in the hope that they’d recharged.
There’s no autosaving in the game, and the game goes out of its way to tell you this; you need to find a bathroom in order to quick-save or manage your save files. I rarely found that I was too far from a saving opportunity, which was fortunate, because especially in the earlier stages of the game where Daryl is weakest, health would sap quite rapidly. There’s nothing stopping Daryl charging at a high-level enemy early on, but you stand little chance of making it past them with your health intact.
As far as eShop games go, Super Daryl Deluxe, with its wacky ideas, vibrant visuals and insane plotlines, is certainly worth a try.
Super Daryl Deluxe
Summary
When we think of eShop titles, we want something to give us an experience that we’ve never had before. Super Daryl Deluxe does that in droves. A more fluid combat system would have got it a higher score, but this one comes well-recommended.