4/10

I’ll be honest; I fell victim to marketing this time around.

The description for The Deer God is “’The Deer God is a breathtaking 3D pixel art adventure that will challenge your religion and your platforming skills.” I thought this game was going to be deeper and more thoughtful than it ended up being.
The breathtaking part was right, though. This is the prettiest pixel game I’ve seen, with a relaxing soundtrack to match. Unfortunately, being pretty does not a game make.

The premise was great. You play as a human that dies while on a hunting trip. In the afterlife, you appear before a spectral deer who decrees you must live and run as a deer to balance out the bad karma you obtained from a life of hunting. Returning to the mortal world as a young fawn, you begin your journey.

And this is where it starts to fall apart. Nothing really gets explained after you start playing, nor are you really given any direction expect run to the right. This gives the game an aimless feeling and not a good aimless like Minecraft. The difference is I know there is some kind of story I’m supposed to be following. There are quests to do, but they aren’t difficult and don’t relate to each other at all. The quests’ problem is that the game procedurally generates as you move, meaning the next area you go to is random. This makes completing tasks a waiting game rather than anything skill based; once you complete the quest you must return to the character who gave it to you, so you have to wait for *that* area to generate again too. Double waiting game.

The other unexplained game mechanic is a karma system. You get bad karma for killing innocent animals (other deer, rabbits, etc.) and good karma for killing bad animals (any predator). Doing this unlocks abilities and, I assume, has something to do with actually completing the game. But it seems very token. The Deer God falls into same trap of many video game morality systems, where the “evil” option doesn’t make any sense. In this case, you have no reason to murder the nice animals. You barely have reason to fight the bad animals because you can just jump over them and keep going, let alone go after the harmless ones.