I said a few weeks back that I was gonna pick one of these for myself, and that time has come.
Deios II // DEIDIA
I stumbled upon this game, or rather the remake of the original Deios, once during my Random Game Names browsings and was struck by its aesthetic and how utterly odd its design seemed to be. Unfortunately that first game seemed to have a focus on combat, combat that seemed rather… let’s say odd enough to be worrisome, which lead me to conclude said game likely wasn’t for me. However when I clicked on the developer link I saw that it had a sequel, one that seemed to lean into the interesting parts of the original while eschewing the combat that scared me away, so I decided that was worth a wishlisting and keeping an eye on. This last Steam sale I finally pulled the trigger on it and decided that I had played enough random weekly games that I earned the right to pick a random(ly discovered) one of my own, and what a journey this was.
DEIDIA is described as a “glitch-venture” where you basically have to explore an abandoned world and have the ability to corrupt said world at any time to try and theoretically aid in said exploration. In terms of a game pitch this reminded me a good deal of F J O R D S, an exploratory platformer where you could use in-game consoles to adjust various elements of its design (is water present, are ghosts visible, can you basically lay a corruption bomb with the press of a button, etc.). I was enough of a fan of that game to try and mostly fail to LP my way through it elsewhere on this forum so having another game like that to dig into was very intriguing, but beyond the similar concepts each game took things in a vastly different direction. Despite the numerous options F J O R D S was very intentionally designed, a coherent “metrovania-esque” world layout where puzzling out which options to enable and disable at a given moment allowed you to break through barriers and dig very deep into its world. In comparison DEIDIA is chaos, it is designed but the world is incoherent and feels like it can collapse at any given moment (and sometimes does). One is predictable, one is utterly not.
Things start off with you in an almost blank space and an introductory text that isn’t found, the latter of which does set the mood for what you can expect. The game tells you WASD to move, lets you walk a bit until you hit a door that requires 20 coins to open of which you only have 15. At this point it tells you to press i to begin farming deitycoin.
Oh yeah, this is a glitch-venture exploratory platformer/clicker mash-up, should have mentioned that. You can use 10 coins to purchase something that mines a coin every second, which you can then use to open said door. This all runs in the background while you do other things and while you do find treasure chests you can open to gain a certain amount of coins (some drop a handful, some literally explode sending hundreds of coins all over the screen that you have to scramble to pick up before they disappear within a few seconds) mining them will get you much more, so every so often it is wise to press i, buy better coin farming stuff and keep ahead of the curve. Or not, most of the game lacks doors and many of them require rather small amounts of coins to open. Or a billion, there is that one door that requires a billion coins to open. I have no clue what is behind that one, I’m not sure even on a run where I invested a lot in farming I ever got more than maybe 3 million tops. Play it by ear I guess.
Oh yeah again, you may have noticed the text at the top and bottom of the screen, that’s always there. It reminds you among other things of where you are, how many coins you got and that you can always mine more money or corrupt the current server (i.e. room/area) you are in. It also warns you to save before you do that. One may question the necessity of having that much text on the screen at all times, much less a warning like that but let me tell you… never try to corrupt the world without saving first. Most games that let you hack/corrupt stuff makes it seem cool and useful, DEIDIA treats it like you are much more likely to break things so dramatically that it will be impossible to recover from.
The first time I played the game I pressed g to see exactly how I could corrupt things and within a few button presses things were so bad that I was either trapped inside geometry or was falling endlessly and the only way to fix things was to restart the entire game. I managed this inside of the area literally labeled tutorial, that is how quickly my first playthrough ended. A couple of the options (such recolor world or shake world) are minor enough to not be immediately problematic, but a few others (such as distort world (which naturally is the first option) or world drift) are so profoundly destructive that I don’t know if there is any possible sane use for them. Naturally the only way to know which type is which is to try them for yourself, always save first. Always.
Anyways I’m not sure the game ever needs you to do any of that anyways.
As you may be starting to realize, the game doesn’t seem to care if what it offers is actually useful or if you should use it or not. It’s not that it trusts you to figure it out, more that it warns you that you will almost certainly screw things up and to prepare accordingly. The game itself will screw up too, so don’t take it personally.
BTW if you try to load a save game after you close the program it will crash trying to reload it, said save games are only designed to be used during the same session to basically serve as a check point in case you need to reload from one, such as after accidentally destroying the world. It never tells you this; that’s how my second playthrough ended.
I should discuss something beyond the tutorial room.
Right, the aesthetics. This is a very fetching game, featuring a noisy pixel look very heavy on parallax. It looks pretty okay in screenshots but really needs to be seen in motion to appreciate, so let me just grab the video from its store page:
Music is solid as well. Anyways, your goal in any room/area is to find a door to the next one. This isn’t a continuous world map, you find a door and you get dropped into a new area. Sometimes that is literally true as you’ll end up in a void falling forever, the game is prepared for such an occurrence as if you go too long without touching the ground it will reset your position to approximately the proper starting location for that region (a bit of the ever present text lets you know how long before a reset is triggered). This is useful as corrupting things can result in neverending falls and if you explore around the periphery of these areas (as you should) you will occasionally fall off the edge of the world to your doom.
Some of these areas have bits of puzzles to them, generally simple stuff like rotating a bar around until it lets you reach someplace useful or maneuvering a ball onto a scale so that a door slowly opens or platform raises. The ball physics are sadly awful which results in some of these being next to impossible, fortunately many of them are either optional or easy enough to bypass via other means such as clever abuse of the wall jump. You might be getting the impression that this isn’t entirely polished and that would be an accurate sentiment. This feels like someone with a gift for art and music trying to make a digital piece that is also a game, so certain things are done in less than typical ways, best practices are unknown and some technical bits are implemented roughly. It won’t shock you to know that it doesn’t have the best wall jump in the world. My third playthrough ended when the game crashed fairly deep in, and as noted saves don’t carry over.
The thing is, while it would be too much to say that this is like a piece of outsider art (the dev is too familiar with several aspects of gaming for that to be a fair descriptor) it is very much playing by its own rules, and while the trade-off for that is a few degrees of polish you are rewarded with an experience that is hard to predict. I don’t mean this in the showy “hah, you thought you were playing a card game and now you are playing a FPS” way but just that games like this have a certain pacing and logic to them that is markedly askew here. Noted earlier are the seemingly central mechanics that can rather easily be ignored for most of the game but even progress through the world feels very haphazard. Some areas are literally a cave where you walk to the side for the equivalent of a single screen and hit a door, sometimes moving forward takes you through what appears to be areas you’ve already come across in reverse, sometimes the game will actually just drop you back in the second or third area in the game and you legit have to go through everything again and not take that same exact path/door again.
This isn’t a huge problem as while there is a somewhat straightforward central path through at least a portion of the game it is both easy to speed through once you are familiar with it and with some pushing there are branches off of it that often don’t lead back to it. You do have the option of following said path though and it will lead you to… a room with a dozen or so unmarked doors that lead all over the place, often to places you’ve already been. Maybe one of them leads towards an ending, I only made it to said room a couple times.
DEIDIA is game where you can feel like you are making progress while also feeling no closer to figuring things out at the same time. Eventually when I was back near the start once again I had an idea, grew bold enough to risk some corruption and got to a new door, which took me along a new path which I had to corrupt even more boldly to get through (I think, might have just been missing a safer option) which eventually ended up dropping me at some later point in the game where I had noticed something on a previous visit, managed to take advantage of that without crashing the game and got to an ending. Said ending provided some answers (turns out the game does have a story, it just doesn’t mention it until the very end) yet left many questions. What was behind the billion coin door, why did windows of ascii art I could draw on pop up, was one of those dozen doors a special one, what if the ball physics weren’t trash and it was feasible to get them onto certain scales? What if I pressed F12 like the dev said you could on the game’s forum and played with all the debug options? In my two and a half hours with the game (“winning” run took maybe forty minutes) did I see most of the game world? Did I see half?
Ultimately I don’t know if DEIDIA is a good game. It is definitely aesthetically pleasing and it is definitely mechanically rough. It is hard to say much definitive about it beyond that, it is a mysterious experience and it does not let go of its mysteries easily. I think in many ways it is a SB kind of game, although figuring out how many would find it interesting as opposed to enjoyable even here is tricky. I had a good time with it when it wasn’t telling me that saves didn’t work or was crashing on me, and while part of me wants to dig deeper I think I’m content leaving some (much?) of it undiscovered, it feels appropriate.
