Slow Times at Ridgemont High

Super Daryl Deluxe is ambitious in its attempt to combine action-platforming adventure, action-RPG combat, and cynical-teenager fantasy storytelling. It's too ambitious. It doesn't pull off any of these things.

The opening scene shows off Daryl's combat, in an obvious dream-sequence scenario where your fighting skills are already significantly upgraded. Which would be a good "hook," except that it's overwhelming and confusing -- there are five combat skills to use! and wave after wave of enemies keep spawning in just to supply more punching bags for you. This thrown-into-the-deep-end intro gives the unfortunate impression that combat is a mindless button-mashing affair.

Then comes a minutes-long, excruciatingly-slow, cringe-filled expository cutscene. The dialog is ... not the worst I've seen, but not very good. And so much of it is unnecessary filler, not to mention the bafflingly-long pauses between lines. "Brevity is the Soul of Wit" was noted four hundred years ago, but no one here seems to have gotten that memo.

Finally the "real" game is introduced, wandering the halls of a high school and doing wacky quests to further along the (admittedly, genuinely mysterious) plot. And as it lacks those pre-upgraded abilities from the intro, this mostly takes the form of a side-scrolling point-and-click adventure: go to this room, talk to this person, go to that room, pick up that thing, go back to the first room...

Mixed into this room-wandering are some platforming controls that are really quite bad. When you hold the jump button, after landing on the ground, Daryl jumps again. And the distance between platforms requires more precision than the game's art style can accurately convey.

I admire the concept, I guess. But while Super Daryl Deluxe introduced many mechanical and narrative ideas in its first hour, none of them were executed well-enough to keep me interested.

Progress: Gave up at the Gorilla Tim fight.