Super Daryl Deluxe Review
An off-the-wall high school RPGvania with bag loads of quirky charm that make up for some small design missteps.
Super Daryl Deluxe loves Napoleon Dynamite. That should frankly have been enough from the off for me to never-ever-play-this-game-ever-in-a-million-years but under that obvious veneer lies a game with a lot to offer for fans of the Metroidvania style of gameplay. You play as Daryl, the new kid at Water Falls High School. After a slightly laboured introduction you are welcomed to the school by the vice principal who hands you off to two classmates to get your new semesters adventure underway. Those two fellow students rapidly inform you that you now work for them and send you on a mission to find some flowers in the school quad which consists of a floating landmass occupied by a human squirrel hybrid and living flowers which are horrified at your approach. That’s Super Daryl deluxe, it ostensibly takes place in a simple American high school but shit gets very weird, very quick – and honestly, it’s kind of brilliant.
Daryl himself is a silent protagonist but unlike in most games where your characters input to conversations is implied from others responses Daryl simply doesn’t talk. Any question directed towards him is met with a pointed silence and a blank stare before it’s taken as a tacit acceptance of the quest you’re being dispatched on. From that first mission picking flowers and breaking into another students’ locker to leave them for him as a generous gift, all the way to reclaiming a tax dodging goblin’s hill home for an intergalactic IRS agent; Super Daryl Deluxe keeps the quest narratives bizarre and entertaining bringing with it along the way a broad cast of colourful characters and irreverent (though sometimes hit and miss) humour.
As well as earning you experience towards your overall level completing quests for the other students of Water Falls High also nets you PP (Popularity Points of course, because high school) which will unlock passive buffs to Daryl’s stats and skills. A lot of these quests however do boil down to ‘kill X of these’ or ‘find Y of these’ but the consistently odd framing and curious menagerie of enemies to plough through helps stop them becoming stale. Quest markers can represent an unwanted level of frustration however, guidance in in the game isn’t particularly great and one or two quests had me tediously wandering around the general area I was told they were in and just hoping to eventually stumble into heading in the right direction.
Combat in Super Daryl consists of a wide array of skills which can be bound to three face buttons and a single trigger to give you 4 different attack skills. A number of forward and back dash skills also become available as you progress resulting in a pretty significant degree of flexibility in building a skill loadout (skills can be swapped in and out freely at Daryl’s locker).
Unfortunately, the skill tier system makes it pretty clear which skills are ‘best’ by ranking them from ‘trash’ to ‘excellent’ which funnels you towards the higher tier skills and takes some of the fun out of experimenting with loadouts. Every skill is upgradeable at the cost of skill experience which is earned from defeating enemies so a skill can be elevated above it’s original class to a degree, but the lower tier skills also have fewer potential upgrade levels than their ‘great’ and ‘excellent’ counterparts so parity is fleeting.
That gripe aside I still found plenty of skills that I enjoyed using from when I originally got them until the end of the game and by the time I finished I’d built a very satisfying arsenal with which to tear through whatever poor soul tried to stop me. Skill animations are also consistently great and evolve in stylish and amusing ways as a skill is upgraded; for example a dash forward which starts with Daryl standing atop a small wave eventually evolves into Daryl surfing a huge wave on the back of a great white shark.
A nice variety of oddball enemies keeps things interesting too, with creatures ranging from flatulent trolls with jetpacks to sentient glockenspiels determined to get in your way. For the most part combat doesn’t consist of much more than hitting each attack button as much as its cooldown allows which isn’t necessarily particularly engaging, but the evolving array of moves and enemies prevent things from becoming dull for the majority of the game.
These stylish skills and madcap enemies are all supported by the strongest facet of Super Daryl Deluxe, its art. Sporting a clean, hand-drawn style largely build around washed out backgrounds that contrast starkly with the splashes of colour that make up Daryls clothes and skills the game looks fantastic in motion. Skills really pop, animations are consistently smooth and impressive to see in action and a wide variety of environments keep things interesting right up until the final boss fight.
By the time you reach that boss fight you will have borne witness to one of the more consistently absurd stories that I’ve ever encountered in a video game. It starts weird and only builds from there hitting beats so utterly nonsensical that I couldn’t help but grin at the sheer batshit insanity of it all. Amongst all of this it still has time to roll out an interesting overarching mystery as you attempt to unravel the truth behind whatever is going on a Water Falls High.
Super Daryl Deluxe is far from perfect but if you can get past it’s imperfections you’ll find a unique and fascinating experience underneath. It’s a wild ride and it doesn’t always work exactly as you’d want, but you’re going to see some weird shit and you’re going end up better for it. Super Daryl Deluxe isn’t just set in high school - it is high school. It might even have done enough to make me reconsider my opinions of Napoleon Dynamite… Nah, it’s still bad. Ah whatever I’ll let it have this one; vote Daryl.