High school is hell.

When I first heard of Super Daryl Deluxe, I thought it was some kind of food truck special, like the Fat Darrell from the famous Rutgers grease food truck. When I was informed that it was actually an action RPG with some really fun ideas, I decided to take a look, and while it’s not quite as filling or delicious as a Fat Darrell, there’s something to be enjoyed here.

The character design of our titular hero is clearly inspired by a rather famous piece of pop culture.

MSRP: $19.99
Platform: Switch
Played: 9~ Hours

It’s tough enrolling into a new school.

It’s tougher when there isn’t a single actual class and textbooks are considered a precious commodity.

It’s tougher still when there are literal monsters and abominations roaming the hallways and classrooms.

Such is the new school life for Daryl, and it only gets weirder from there.

The word that comes to mind when I think of the story present here is, “imaginative”. Sure, there are some cliche elements sprinkled throughout the game, but for the most part, I found myself going through a new area and encountering the myriad of oddball creations thinking, “boy, I wonder what drugs they were using when they came up with this stuff?”.

Given that the strongest selling point of the game is seeing what crazy situation you’ll end up in next, I won’t spoil anything specific outside of saying that it even took inspiration from an old favorite movie of mine, “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure”.

While the main story quests often feature some fun scenarios, it’s a shame that the vast majority of the side quests were dull, by the numbers, checklist collectathons. Given how much creativity is present in the main quests, I would have liked to have seen more effort put into the optional activities.

The combat started out feeling very limited and boring but opened up as I gained more skills.

The combat in SDD is mostly action based, but what sets it apart from the standard-fare hack and slash RPGs was the ability to customize what skills I wanted to have available to use.

Given that each of the skills had a certain cooldown before they could be used again, I had to combo one skill into another to keep enemies stunlocked. In the beginning, I was quite limited in my move selection that I was using mostly hit and run tactics, but as I continued add new devastating skills to my arsenal, I found myself constantly on the offensive.

Each of the moves could be upgraded using experience, increasing their effectiveness and reducing their cooldown so they could be used more often. I could also equip a variety of armor and accessories that increased Daryl’s stats and granted him special passive abilities.

While the combat itself was fine, the animation work on movement and attacks felt lacking in many ways due to how abruptly they went into one another. It was missing a sense of fluidity that the best 2D sprite games in the market have, and even though it could be chocked up to a creative decision, it’s not one that looked particularly impressive.

It’s a shame, as the sprite work itself was quite good but as it stands, SDD is a game that looks better in screenshots than it does in video clips.

Hello, can I just AXE you a question?

Super Daryl Deluxe is difficult game to describe due to its strange narrative and mix-match of gameplay elements. It draws inspiration from many movies and games alike and while it certainly could have used a lot more polish, it’s a worthy effort and a promising start to a brand new indie development team.

Fun Tidbit – Be excellent to each other.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.