A Gorgeous Adventure-Puzzle That is too Familiar to Soar
‘Deer’ gets first-billing in Deer & Boy, and I can see why. It’s the real star of the show, helping ‘Boy’ over countless obstacles and staying unruffled even though giant boars, purple corruption and tentacles are clearly after it. It’s impossibly cute, whether tucked into Boy’s bag or clomping around in the later game. Frankly, Boy would be lost without Deer.
There are other reasons to fall in love with Deer, but if there was ever a game to resist spoiling, it’s this one. Deer & Boy is a platform-adventure in a 2.5D space, very much in the milieu of Limbo, Inside, Little Nightmares and Bramble: The Mountain King. Like those games, the experience is paramount. Deer & Boy lurches from surprise to surprise, some of them born from the world, other times from the gameplay. The only constant is Boy: everything else, from your companion to the world, shifts, and it does so constantly.
What Do You Call a Deer with No Eyes?
The game starts with a suggestion that Boy is a runaway child, and Deer – a fawn – has lost its herd. We say ‘suggestion’ because there’s no dialogue or voices in Deer & Boy. This is a story that you have to pick up from details in the environment and the animations of the characters. Luckily, the animations in particular are superb.
By making Boy a runaway, everyone in the world can be a hazard. There are wanted posters around, asking if anyone has seen Boy, so even a family in a Diner becomes dangerous. Someone at Lifeline Games has something against labourers, as the opening levels tend to make builders and workspeople into enemies that should be avoided.
The platforming at the start of Deer & Boy is pretty simple. Without a chunky fawn in his backpack, the boy can climb, grab ledges and generally be nimble, in a slightly sub-Prince of Persia, sub-Flashback way. But the Boy wants to keep the fawn with him, so you have to find ways to progress without leaving it behind for long. Cue lots of pushing of logs, breaking down walls and pushing buttons.
Fawning Over the Deer Companion
But while Boy is a constant, Deer is not. It’s really hard not to spoil what follows, but let’s just say that the relationship between Boy and Deer is asymmetrical. Deer changes over the course of Deer & Boy, and the power-dynamic shifts. Where Boy was the dominant one at the start of the game, Deer begins to take over. Boy can always do the same moves, from beginning to end; your companion gains and sheds abilities.
Progression, like Inside, Little Nightmares et al, is about hitting walls. You will make headway thanks to some platforming or exploration, until something blocks your way. Then it’s a case of puzzling out what will get you through. That will be some combination of the abilities of your two characters (Boy can prompt Deer to do things with a hold of the B button, but you never control it directly). There will also be some reading of the environment, as you look for minecarts to push, and elevators to lift.
But Deer & Boy’s puzzles definitely err towards the familiar. I feel like I’m done with large, unkillable creatures who look one side to the other, and you have to stealthily move past while they are staring the other way. Deer & Boy pulls this trick not once but many times (just because you are changing from torches to eyeballs to blasts of energy doesn’t mean it’s different), and the gameplay starts to feel a bit worn. The exact same is true for malevolent, unkillable forces coming left to right at the player, and the player having to run away. There is a rolling sense of ‘been there, seen that’ with a lot of the scenarios.
My First Limbo
The puzzles are fine but not overly strenuous. There is an argument for Deer & Boy to be a kind of entry game for the genre. There is a restricted moveset available to the player at any one time, meaning that there are only four or five options for how to solve a given puzzle. Plus the world gives abundant visual cues: ledges are handily marked, characters recoil from things they want to avoid. Checkpoints are frequent and friendly. But anyone who is looking for a challenge from their platform-puzzler should understand what they are getting into. There is nothing here that tickles the difficulty spikes of the games I mentioned in the second paragraph.
What Deer & Boy does have in abundance is presentational care. My wife said that it looks like an animated John Lewis advert, but I think she means that as a compliment. In its lighting and animation in particular, Deer & Boy is sensational, delivering an immersive world that seems to wrap around the characters and encase them. Emotion pours out of the animations, as you bond with the Deer through its vulnerabilities and strengths. It’s impressive that a game without voice or dialogue can make you feel as much as this does.
But there is a caveat, in that I found certain parts of the story to feel shallow and overly familiar. It didn’t hit as hard as it possibly should have. The enemy, for example, is a bland and faceless purple goo that I feel like I have seen in countless movies, kids platformers and more. Sections are too reminiscent of other games, as industrial areas remind of Inside and a (too long) ending sequence felt drafted directly from Alan Wake. An emotional pivot point recalled Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, and it’s too obvious where the ride is heading.
A Game That we Would Deerly Want to Love More
I’m being grumpy about Deer & Boy because it skirts so close to the classics of the genre. There are moments where I feel like putting down the pad and clapping, whether it’s a beautifully composed cutscene or a soaring musical interlude. But those remarkable moments are often in the moments between gameplay. I felt like Deer & Boy most disappointed me when I was delving into its puzzles or action sequences, mostly because they echoed something I had already played. That and they never pushed me to think, or sharpen my reflexes.
I feel like almost everyone who starts Deer & Boy will finish it. Presentationally, it’s incredibly appealing, and the Deer is so cute that it’s almost sickening. The gameplay is frictionless, and there’s a familiarity to the puzzles that means you can complete most of them with a kind of muscle memory. As a first step into games like Inside and Little Nightmares, it’s a steady one.
To my taste, though, I would have welcomed a little less of that familiarity, and a little more friction. I breezed through Deer & Boy, wondering when it was going to grip me, but it never did. As someone who adores the genre, my final feeling was one of confusion. Deer & Boy felt like a game I was going to fall in love with. It was inevitable. But I ended up merely charmed.
Important Links
Cinematic Platformer Deer & Boy is a Poetic Journey of Friendship – https://www.thexboxhub.com/cinematic-platformer-deer-boy-is-a-poetic-journey-of-friendship/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/deer-boy/9nh79h1pvq04
