Super Daryl Deluxe review – Strange things afoot at school

Part metroidvania, part brawler, and part side-scrolling RPG, Super Daryl Deluxe is a funny, over-the-top, and challenging indie that doesn’t shy away from its influences. No where else, to my knowledge, can you travel from the pyramids of Giza, the great wall of China, & Ebenezer Scrooge’s mansion to the streets of Vienna, the musical halls of Beethoven and Mozart, and The Shire from Lord of the Rings. This game is jam packed full of pop culture references, twisted historical events, and an absolutely off-the-wall plot that will keep you shaking your head and muttering, “video games, man…” under your breath.

Super Daryl Deluxe is one of the most unique games I’ve played in years, but it is also one of the most flawed. Where the combat shines, the dialogue takes a crippling hit. With great RPG systems comes a frustrating control scheme. A snazzy comic-book art-style is unfortunately hindered with nary a likeable character in sight. Add to this a severely stretched out playtime, and pages upon pages of dialogue fluff, and it makes it hard to give Daryl the A+ he might have otherwise deserved.

You play as Daryl, the new kid on the block at Water Falls High School, where strange things are certainly afoot. After meeting with the strangely robotic principal, you find yourself entangled with a crew of textbook-hocking scumbags who order you to scour the school in search of the textbooks to sell. These textbooks become the premium currency in the game, but more on that later. As Daryl ventures through the halls of Water Falls high, the classrooms give way to other dimensions where characters, both historical and fictional, exist. The game developers have flexed their creative muscles to mash up every imaginable reference to popular franchises, fairy tales, classic literature, and historical fables as inhabitants of these classrooms. This is where Daryl spends the bulk of the game, traversing these rooms in search of textbooks and completing quests for those he meets.

Where the prose and excessive dialogue is a let down, high praise can be given to the variety of locations you visit during the game. An early-game highlight is the “Music & Art Classrooms”, where you find yourself completing quests for Beethoven, and duking it out against Skrillex and his army of boombox-wielding saxophone men. Roaming the streets of Vienna, you’ll find sculptors and painters, and even do fetch quests for the great Andy Warhol. Traverse the top floor of the theater hall and you’ll meet Mozart experimenting with dub-step, while a wannabee Ghost Busters crew attempt to capture and remove trombone-toting ghosts. Does this all sound ridiculous? Wait until you help Ghengis Khan build a trojan horse while picking flowers for Cleopatra in the history class.

The enemies inhabiting these worlds are as varied and interesting as the locations themselves. Flexing cactus, glass beakers with bulging biceps, cursed nutcrackers, flesh-eating meatballs, a schoolboy that transforms into Donkey Kong… I could go on. The whimsical and absurd nature of the character design certainly adds flair to the already out-of-this-world scenario, and is perhaps the closest the game comes to achieving its potential. The comic-book style of the drawings and the disparity between monochromatic and full colour palettes goes the extra mile to highlight these visual wins, often making me feel like I was indeed playing through a comic book.

The music is, unfortunately, one of the most bland elements of the game. Dull, repetitive tones fail to complement the visual feast on display in Super Daryl Deluxe, and for me that is a big disappointment. Clearly the game takes influence from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (visiting and interacting with different characters throughout history), and even takes the time to reference the titular characters themselves, so it is a real shame the game doesn’t echo the one-two punch of tight visuals and a solid soundtrack.

While 70% of the game’s dialogue is text-only, there are the occasional cut-scene with voice acting. The voice work is reminiscent of 90s cartoons, with over-the-top villain voices and goofy, gawking sidekicks. Perhaps if there were more instances of this it wouldn’t come off as on-the-nose as it does, but at the same time I can appreciate what the creators were going for.

Finally, the game’s performance. Super Daryl Deluxe runs perfectly; not once did I experience any hiccups in the game’s frame-rate or visual fidelity. The one glaring issue I encountered came in the form of quest bugs. On several occasions, there were quests that failed to track my progress correctly, and even one that left me trapped in a side portal with a countdown clock that never ran out. Resetting the game fixed it, but it certainly hindered the flow of the game and, as there is no auto-save, resulted in over an hour of lost progress.