Review: The Deer God – PS4, PS Vita

Despite living in Nebraska, I’m not a hunter. I have, unfortunately, produced my fair share of road-kill, but I’ve never hit a deer. All of this is to say, I don’t think I’ve done anything to get on the wrong side of The Deer God, and yet there were times playing this game that felt like punishment from above.
I have to say, I understand what the team at Crescent Moon were shooting for, pun intended. It’s a game about karma, reincarnation and most obviously a big, sloppy love letter to nature. In Old Testament fashion, the game starts with The Deer God turning a deer hunter who dies in a hunting accident into a tiny fawn to survive or (more likely) die a horrible, lonely death in the wilderness.
Playing as the tiny, doomed deer, you’ll run and double jump through randomly generated, highly pixellated environments. If you survive long enough, you’ll grow bigger and faster, until you grow into that deer your mama always knew you could be. Speaking of mothers, eventually you’ll stumble upon some deer of the opposite sex, and in true Discovery Channel fashion, you’ll get to procreate. No, seriously, you do it (deery style?) until you create the most biblical “extra life” in video game history. When you inevitably find yourself impaled on some crudely drawn, natural spikes, you’ll get to carry on as the little Bambi you helped create.

In addition to the aforementioned sexy-time, throughout the game you’ll earn special abilities, like razor-sharp hooves or piercing antlers, as well as good and bad karma skills. You get bad karma by head-butting innocent animals to death, which actually sounds about right. The only downside to this is the animals are so pixellated that it was never easy to tell which animal was which. If you die with bad karma, you’ll be reincarnated as something other than the deer. Once I came back as a porcupine (I think it was a porcupine, but due to the highly pixellated artwork, that is only a guess). The problem here is that whatever my new form was, it didn’t have a jump command, and I was stuck between two boulders. So in the end, I was forced to watch myself starve to death before I could be reincarnated as something that could actually jump. While that may be karmic justice, it sure as hell wasn’t any fun, and the game is supposed to be fun, isn’t it?

The Deer God is obviously a side scrolling title, and as a big fan of the genre, I really thought I would like it. I cut my teeth on classics like Bionic Commando, Castlevania and to a lesser degree, Rygar, but The Deer God just didn’t live up to my expectations. The randomly generated environments quickly began to look the same and lose any charm they may have once had. It was also noticeable that there were far too few level changes in the landscape. If you found yourself galloping along a flat mountain top, you could bet that is your only option. There is little to no opportunity to drop down to another, less obvious, path. It left me feeling that there was never a real alternative to completing a particular level or tough section. In the end, you simply run from left to right, jumping from one cliff to the next, while avoiding obstacles like lava pits and head-butting all of the “bad” animals you can find. Though it may look and sound like The Deer God is simply a “runner”, it really isn’t. I did encounter some interesting bosses and there were more than several “fetch” quests, but neither of these elements ever managed to raise the gameplay to an enjoyable level. The pixellated graphics also made it especially hard to read the dialogue whenever our little deer met anyone.
 
I thought running through the wilderness as a deer would be fun, if not relaxing, but it turned out to be neither. The limited controls felt okay, but the game’s physics were not as tight as they needed to be. When jumping over a set of lethal spikes from one tiny rock to an even smaller tiny rock, I never felt I had complete control of the little guy. You could argue that this particular complaint is more my lack of skill, and some players will undoubtedly find the games artwork endearing, it was just too pixellated for my liking. One positive is that the game is a crossbuy with the PS Vita, so if you buy it on either system, you’ll be able to download to the other system for free. Ironically enough, I found the game looked better and played just as good (if not better) on the Vita.

In the end, the days came and went and the weather changed, but I never had much fun playing The Deer God and that is a sin even a strange forest deity can’t forgive.

Review Disclaimer: This review was carried out using a digital copy of the game provided by the publisher. For more information, please read our Review Policy.
*Reviewed on Base PS4.