By Sean Perryman on February 28, 2015 at 10:56am
I walk into an office today and am greeted by a huge deer head mounted on the wall. The owner of said "memorabilia" informs me that this magnificent creature was hunted by his great grandfather and is now almost 100 years old. I can't help but wonder if that deer that was shot was somehow reborn into a new baby deer; free to roam the forest and jump its little heart out.
"The Deer God" is of the platformer genre and was developed by Crescent Moon Games and Cinopt Studios. It was released in 2014 via Steam Early Access, but developers fully released the game on Feb. 27, 2015. It is currently enjoying a 15 percent sale to celebrate their 1.0 release, which is scheduled to end March 6.
The first thing you cannot help but notice about this game is how much it resembles Fez in its art direction and being "3D without really being 3D" nature. This is not to say it is a clone by any means. The game mechanics presented in this game are interesting and stand on their own. It starts off with you watching a non-playable hunter. You watch while your buddy turns in for the night, and you notice a deer that is just ripe for the picking. As you take aim down your scope, you are attacked by what I assume are wolves, and are viciously murdered.
It is then you are brought before the Deer God to atone for your crimes against deer-anity. The Deer God tells you that you must pay for what you've done, and you come to discover that the payment will be taken in the form of you becoming a deer and having to live the life that you so often destroyed. You start out the game as a baby deer, and quickly find that you can run and jump like you would expect. The double jump ability is given to you very early on, as this is a very platformy platformer you will use it often.
Being of the platformer variety, you are almost immediately tasked with solving some quick puzzles and then given free reign to run to the right to your hearts content. You meet up with various characters along the way who cleverly imbue you with the knowledge needed to get through the puzzles by way of interesting story elements. For example you run into an old man who eventually teaches you that you can 'attack' (hit a button while moving towards something) a bush to produce items.
Speaking of the combat mechanics, I found them to be a little dodgy at times. You are supposed to rush toward something and hit a button to attack, but it seems to be dependent on the light blue bar below your health meter, and it seems to run out very quickly. Not attacking with refill your health, and you can continue on killing other woodland creatures to your hearts content. I found that when you kill another deer, the light that is produced upon their death is red; whereas killing most other kinds of creatures (snakes, monkeys, armadillos, where the hell is this game supposed to be located where you have all of those animals anyway??) produces a nice blue light when you slaughter them.
While you are scampering through the game world you will come across vegetation and flowers that you can eat. Doing so seems to make you progress into teenager-dom, and then into adulthood; each phase making you a little stronger and faster. Saving your game takes place when you come across a doe (a deer, a female deer) and stand next to her. Doing this causes a little heart icon to appear and start filling up. Once it is full a little baby deer pops out and your game is saved. You can apparently run with this baby deer and cause him to sit; when you die next you spawn back into him, so presumably you'd want to get him as far as you possibly can. On a side note when you are reborn, a high ray of light comes up from the spot where you are lying. I found that to be very lion king-y (never in a bad way).
The puzzles I ran into in this game were of a seemingly standard fare, though I found them to be adequately difficult in comparison to some of the other puzzle platformers I've seen lately. The best example of this was a puzzle where an old stag tells you to cross a gap that no mere mortal could possibly cross, then come back to him. I figure that this game was an oddly placed set of train tunnels, that were traversed by you hopping on the train and then hopping off at the next section. Getting through this puzzle led me to question that the stag told me to come see him once I'd done it; I don't think it would be possible to go back across that gap, as the train only goes one way. Perhaps it is like the old man puzzle before, and that elder stag will be waiting for me further down the road.
All things considered this game is absolutely gorgeous. The colors the developers have chosen are perfect, and the lighting effects and shadowing are second to none. My only complaint about the game is that the pixels are so large that everything becomes very abstract; even more so than in games that were forced to render in big pixels. That could be a conscious design decision, or it could be because my monitor is big. Either way it was a slight detraction from the overall experience, but was definitely not enough to pull me out of this game. I cannot recommend it highly enough, and if this is a measurement of what this studio can do I am looking forward to seeing what they come up with next!
"The Deer God" is available on Steam right now for 15 percent off of their normal price of $14.99.
