Deliriant Reviews

  • DadmondMilesDadmondMiles29,921
    18 Oct 2018 27 Oct 2018
    4 0 1
    I picked up Deliriant for less than 5 bucks on PSN with no prior knowledge of it. I'm not sure what I expected (perhaps some kind of room escape, or visual novel, or even an emotional platformer-adventure like Rime), but turns out it's a walking simulator. Okay, I can get into that. Usually.

    But Deliriant is a very bare-bones walking simulator, with no dialogue or narration or sound effects. There's also no real music to speak of, just a constant throbbing "wob-wob-wob" soundtrack.

    At the start of the game I thought something was broken, as I was in a totally white screen except for the dot of my "cursor". Moving around didn't do anything that I could tell, so I closed and reopened the game application and tried again. I was in the same white space. But after some time I found a door to go through.

    After going through this door you're in a two-story house with a 1970's America style. Items can be picked up and rotated, and the story is entirely told through details of the items, such as the fine print on the back of boxes and the text on book jackets. Gameplay is progressed by going into the different rooms of the house, and then returning downstairs to find something has changed.

    The major flaw is the that the control scheme for rotating items was highly confusing. In addition, when most items are grabbed, they reverse their orientation from the way they were in the environment.

    Certain items can be moved from their location and carried around, but this has no effect on gameplay and I feel it was developer error. Similarly, many faucet handles have a highlight as though you can interact with them, but you can't actually (Though you can flush the toilets, soundlessly). The door-opening is also wonky, usually not working from interacting directly with the highlighted handle, but from the area around the handle, and then only if you stand in certain spots.

    The story isn't much to write home about, something about a harried housewife, a gaslighting husband, their "flawed children", and possibly drug abuse. If you actually manage to rotate items enough to read the environmental storytelling on the back, it's a bit heavyhanded, not leaving much up to thought or interpretation. It also ends VERY abruptly.

    The best aspect of Deliriant, in my opinion, is the graphics. The house and the second area (which I won't spoil in this review) are pretty good-looking. When animations kick in, they're impressive.
    There's several places where details of walls appear or disappear depending on the angle your cursor is at, and there are photographs on the fridge that have a very strange quality when you rotate them, and a few items with accidentally mirrored graphics when you pick them up, but other than that it was visually decent.

    Overall, this really felt like a college final project for a game dev course, especially with the lack of music/narration. It's actually by the indie studio Manic Interactive LLC (which has 2-10 employees according to LinkedIn, although there were about 30 names in the credits). This appears to be Manic's one and only game, and their website no longer exists. Perhaps they'd still be around if Deliriant was more polished.

    I don't regret buying this game, as it was a decent way to kill an hour (well, 47 minutes, and that was with a lot of dicking around), but if you're looking for great gameplay or great story, look elsewhere. (Trophy-hunters, knock yourselves out, as all 12 of these unlock quite easily in one playthrough.)

    Graphics: 3/5
    Controls: 2.5/5
    Sound: 2/5
    Story: 3/5
    Overall: 2/5
    2.0
    Showing only comment.
    ManuBAD_iT+1
    Nice review clap
    Posted by ManuBAD_iT on 19 Oct 18 at 10:40
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