The Deer God

this game makes me bug tf out and has caused visceral rage even as a child when this was available for free on my crappy samsung galaxy. 10/10 would recommend if you like pretty pixel art and are slightly masochistic

Boring music, bland visuals that wash together, messy collision boxes, confusing redundant respawn mechanics when thats like the entire message of the game and a preachy one at that, where if a predator kills itself on spikes you are evil and are punished by being made a snake where you can no longer platform in this platforming game so presumable was just waiting to die to come back as something else (even though I had babies to respawn as to begin with).

Honestly for such a simple game with such a singular mechanic it gives no room to hide and they failed hard. Took me years to final sit down and give this a proper go, but now I wish I never did.

It all starts as a simple, meaningless adventure game. Then, slowly, you transform into the deer.
The graphics... The soundtrack... Together, hey really bring you in to a new level of immersion.
You learn how to move and interact with objects around you. How to admire the trees and the mountains. How to relax by the reflective waters and the orange sunset. And you also fight for survival and run for your life.
Unlike most games I feel that this game is not about beating a final boss or getting to end, it is all about the journey.
Honestly, this is not a game. This is a mindfulness experience. This is catharsis. This is The Deer God.

You start as a hunter, staying up late and looking for a deer to shoot for an easy meal; two come along, a big stag and a young fawn, and you line up your shot! Unfortunately for you, wolves attack and lightning strikes you at the same time and the baby fawn is shot instead. You definitely died; but the next time your eyes open it’s directly into the floating form of The Deer God, and they look pretty miffed. Appalled by your accidental cruelty, they reincarnate you as a baby deer and the only way to become human again is to redeem yourself. Good luck?

3-7 hour pixel platform side-scrolling adventure game where you play as a deer. Start as a baby and stumble your way to adulthood, complete easy push puzzles to gain various power ups; and use them and your platforming skills to beat some simple bosses. There is a karma system in place, if you’re good other deer will assist you in fights and follow you, but if you murder too many bunny rabbits you get reincarnated as one next time you die. I didn’t experience any bugs, and while the game is pretty easy, you could still die in a moment of carelessness. The only thing “unbalanced” is the Hail skill, where you have a Hail AOE that lasts a couple seconds you can actually stack/spam; I recommend it against one of the last flying bosses. Overall, The Deer God is a fantastic game and I don’t understand why the current reviews are mixed.

I love the art style, game concept, and puzzles!
I just wish there was more to the story and game play loop. The game gets repetitive after a while and requires good RNG for certain bosses to spawn (cough cough beaver). I just wish there was more to the game even though I enjoyed it.

After watching a video or two of this game I decided that it looked awesome. What I expected was a metrovania game where you're a deer. What I got was -Super Run to The Right The Game-. Never before have I been so disappointed by running to the right for 2.7 hours. Fortuntely, the game was short and sweet. I beat it in about 2.7 hours and will never return to play it again.

On the positive, it looks like someone put a lot of heart into this game and I respect that. The game has some beautiful areas and an easy listening soundtrack. If you're looking for a casual, peaceful gaming experience and don't mind the repetitive nature of runnig to the right for a few hours, this game is for you. If you're looking for a deep gameplay experience and excitment, perhaps you should move along to another game.

A little repetitive after some time, but the ambient and graphics are really good, totally worth it if it is on sale.

This game is infuriating at times, but really pretty and has a unique effect about it: your rage fades you actually become perfectly chill and content. I liked it a lot.

Very nice visuals and atmosphere, but that's it... the game is quite repetitive, enemies are very dumb (often killing themself, or blindly coming towards you) and objectives are unclear. Anyway, for a few dollars it's worth a trip in the colorful 8bit world of deer god, so buy it only in discount

This game seems beautiful, to offer a good gameplay, but at the moment it is unplayable :

You play some minutes and right after the world stops to generate, despite of the game you are playing (solo/online), your game is broken, you have to reset, there is no solution for the moment.

I played less than 2 hours and it happened 5 times on 6 games ! On the first game, I died before. Was my first 1.6 hours on this game, so you get the idea.

It is not an isolated bug, I had a contact with the editor, he said they know this horrible bug, and still not fixed, the developper does not know from what it comes...

So if you buy it, you have to know, you'll probably won't be able to play it more than some few minutes every try.

I can't advise you to buy it.

This game has lots of potential, but it's far from complete.... It's pretty, and I really love the art style, but that's about it.

I've managed to fall out of the map twice, and have also managed to respawn into a totally black landscape where one's only escape is to find a cliff and jump to your doom. I was also unable to progress due to some tortoise NPCs not spawning?

The map seems to repeat itself until you complete your 'task', and kind of assumes I know what I'm doing, with no option to review quests or even controls.

Pretty much all I am doing is running right and jumping, and trying not to die, but also trying not to get tripped up by glitches. A bit like robot unicorn attack but much more confusing and a bit less fun, I guess...

I can't understand how this has even mostly positive reviews.

Deer God, is monotonous, repetative, glitchy and overpriced. I stupidly bought it because of the visual design and the soundtrack but £11 is not worth a game that only consists of jumping and running right with minimal shoddy combat.
They've sold it on having some sort of profound spiritual content in the story but the story barely exists. You're a hunter that has shot a baby deer and is turned into one to find redemption, you'd hope there was some environmental meaning or something about the barbarism of recreational hunting but no theres nothing, just simplistic platforming and holding the right directional arrow. You dont even need to engage in combat really.

Don't waste your money on this game.

This is a "game" best played on some weed when youre really tired. Its extremely relaxing and lovely to look at- a perfect title to unwind with.

Its AI is rather ignorant and all battles amount to "charge- jump over their charge- charge the other way- jump over their charge- ETC" so theyre pretty simple.

Quests are nonsensical (a man asks you to recruit members into his church? Wuh...?? Oh, theyre literally right outside the door, cool) and require little to zero thought, which makes this even more of a title to relax to.

Theres supposed to be some message about reincarnation or killing nature or something, but I never really "got it" (because aside from the intro screens and some asinine quests theres no real story progression).

If you treat it like the "laser light show" that it is- AKA "kick back, let your brain go into neutral and look at the pretty things"- you may enjoy this one.

Otherwise, if youre looking for "legit" platforming, story, quests or enemies, well....this unfortunately doesnt have much of any. Keep running right til the game ends.

As a member of the Cervine blood, I really wanted to like this game more than I did. It had lots of potential. Optimally, this shouldve been a "Metroidvania" type of game- a maze which you couldnt progress through without "X" skill.
Unfortunately, as a member of the gaming community since the mid 80's, Id suggest you pass on this one unless you really, really like deer or those type of quiet, pretty games that ultimately put you to sleep.

I wish Steam would allow a "NEUTRAL" recommendation, cuz I honestly cant approve or disapprove, depending on how you take the title. Youve heard what I have to say about it at least!

+ the music and ambience
+ graphics style
+ quite original idea

- confusing: i finished the game but still dont know what some of the objects did / what was their purpose. i didnt learn all the skills before end of the game and sometimes quest objects didnt appear until after multiple "rounds"
- not so fun to play: i.e. fighting mobs is boring and no rewards
- "procedural world" seems to be generated from static blocks that are appended in "random" order and very soon the world becomes boring since the same blocks repeat over and over again

The game is really beautiful. However, if you are looking not for sightseeing, but an actual game to play, you'll have to look elsewhere. Deer God is a game about running right, jumping over spikes and wondering what is going on and what are you supposed to do. Gameplay literally falls apart. You get attacked by foxes and skunks, but can easily outrun any enemies. There are NPCs with rudimentary quests like "please bring my children a nut from that barrel". Sometimes you run across a primitive puzzle and get rewarded with a power like fireball, which you have no enemies to use on. Sometimes you run across bosses with no reason to fight them. The game is a terrible mess pretending to be a work of art. Avoid it.

This game is broken. A couple times I'd die and then not be able to progress through the game because certain ledges require you to be at least a teen deer before you can reach them. Sometimes very small platforms are obscured by objects in the foreground, making it very hard to land the jump and not die immediately.

Also I got stuck under the turtle boss TWICE and couldn't get out because he just sits on top of you. Died of hunger. The AI is dumb as all hell, the dash costs too much mana and is hard to control, dashing near spikes is not recommended.

Once you're an adult, the game becomes almost too easy, but if you die and turn back into a baby deer because you ran out of those extra life things, you're screwed, buddy. You can't jump or hit for crap as a baby and by that point all the enemies are meant for the adult deer.
This is not good game design!

Aside from all that, the game looks gorgeous and the music is good. The platforming is fun when it's not game-breaking and infuriating, which is a minority of the time. I want to like this game, please, fix it!

"Did...did I just make a baby? Dude, where the fuck is my baby!? ...yo, fucking snake just ate my baby! Oh well, back to being irresponsible" - Bob, while playing this game.

Don't feel like reading all of this? Check out my review in video form here

Pros:
_Beautiful: I don't usually care much for artistic design, but goddamn this game looks good. The pixel art is well made with lots of details in both the environment and the characters. Colorful, too, with the ambient lighting and mood changing with the time of day. In short, it's purdy.
_Great soundtrack: Don't know what else to say here. The music is good.
_Interesting concept: You play as a deer hunter reincarnated as a deer by the deer god. Then you go and eat food to grow into a big deer then have deer babies. If you die, you get reincarnated as one of your babies. What I'm trying to say is the game is weird in the best posible way.
_Tight control: the game feels great, jumping is nice and solid, and attacking is impactful.

Cons?
_It's... boring: Here's the part where the discussion happens for this game, or at least I hope. Mechanically speaking, this game is boring. You just run right, then run right some more. Tired of running right? Keep running right, then, until you're not tired of running right anymore. There's an inventory system here that doesn't do much, and a quest system that's pretty bare-boned.

But does that matter?

Now that's the million dollars question, isn't it? I feel a lot about this game the way I feel about Sunless Sea. In term of minute-to-minute gameplay, I cannot recommend this game in good faith. There's no game here. But somehow I don't feel like it's a bad game. I find myself strangely attached to it. For such a boring non-game game, it's... good. it's immersive, beautiful, and interesting.

Overall, you'd like this game if:
_You like pretty game with good music.
_You like tight jumping control with lots of platforming. Cuz this game has tons.
_You want to fulfill your lifelong dream of being a deer. Majestic creatures.

Is it worth $15? I think from the first glance at the game, you already know this answer. If you the type of person that would like this game, then you're already at the checkout screen. If you're a more mechanic-minded person, however, this won't be the game for you. But for the cost of 5 cups of coffee, you might find yourself surprised at how much you like it. I certainly did.

Shameless plugs time! Did you like my review? I do more than just that. I also have a YouTube channel where i do Let's Play as well as more reviews like these, but in video form. Come check it out here. My channel is small right now, but I play on making it a regular thing, so hit that subscribe button to see more content. Thank you!

ENG:

The game is visually appealing and a great idea! Action game, the player is only supposed to eat the food to grow, so can not exceed the new barriers. Player can open environment in order to move forward platformer like manner, in which fields in the game change every time you play.

The game ends and starts from the beginning that after death, but you can compare the performance of growth or the distance to justify to you. Referral! :3


FIN:

Peli on visuaalisesti ja ideana loistava! Toiminnaltaan pelissä pelaajan on vain tarkoitus syödä ruokaa kasvaakseen, jotta voi ylittää uusia esteitä. Pelaaja pääsee avaamaan ympäristöä siinä edetäkseen tasoloikka maisesti, jossa pelin kentät vaihtuvat joka peli kerralla.

Peli loppuu ja alkaa alusta joka kuoleman jälkeen, mutta voit verrata suoritustasti kasvun tai etäisyyden perustella mihin pääset. Suositteluni! :3

The Deer God is beautiful, mysterious, and challenging. Want to understand what kind of game it is? Think of it as a procedurally generated Echo The Dolphin, only with deer (doesn't that sound fantastic? Here it is) instead of marine mammals. You move about the world, gain powers and abilities, try to stay alive, try to gain new lives through mating - and try to keep your replacement incarnations alive despite the fact they try to follow you around - and work to gain power in the world.

You will die a lot, initially, until you gain some mastery, but this game is worth the effort to learn it. Initially, you can only run and jump and eat and mate. But you are no ordinary deer, you are a magical deer on a misson of redemption, and before long you will possess the powers of... a god. A deer god.

This is one of those rare, special, precious games you should jump on and get immediately. This is a 'Wow!' sort of game, the kind of one-in-a-million wonderments that there are far too few of. This game is a work of passion and love, and it shows in every astonishingly crafted pixel... and voxel.

You will learn how to move through the forest as a primal deer Lord Of All. You will also learn that foxes, porcupines, and men with guns are jerks. Seriously, get off me you damn fox. Leave my babies alone. Dammit.

Want to do Dragon Ball Z fireballs from your antlers? Well, get your hooves on. Sunch power won't come easily, and you will get your flanks chewed up more than once... but it will come.

Recommended!

Beautiful graphics! A wonderful sense of speed! Relaxing music!

*BUT WAIT...!

Any positive traits that could possibly be bestowed on this game have the misfortune of being attatched to a design that is pretty baffling if I am being totally honest. And I dont write negative reviews. I rarely have a reason to complain, if at all.

Well good job then Deer God. I can't, not, talk about you.

So here is what you can expect to be doing in Deer God:
- Jumping. No like, endlessly harrasing your gamepad's A button to get over obstacles that you eventually learn to do with your eyes closed. That is, after seeing them for the 7,000th time.
- Retracing your steps through the same handful of endlessly repeating maps, just waiting to come across an NPC with more than fairly dissapointing dialogue.
- Do a fetch quest. For nearly every NPC. The items or actions for which may be located 10 feet away from them. Don't have the item they need? Tough! You'll be seeing them as you run past them again and again within the next 30 seconds as the game decides to spawn in the same encounter again and again instead of one of the other current, applicable ones.
- Mate with female deer. Which produces an offspring that will follow you, because? Then either Alpha, or Beta occurs: A: It gets stuck shortly after being born, or B: Immediately jumps into the nearest hole with spikes in it.
- Eating over and over and over and over again. If eating in Minecraft was ever an annoyance, Deer God cranks it beyond levels we have not even begun to fathom.
- And Basically evading every element of danger with ease. Because by the time they know you are there, they are either STUCK or the programming is removing them to save resources after you leave it 50 yards to the west.

There is another point worth mentioning. The game wants to think that it is about survival, thus it only gives you one life total for each adventure. However, due to the IMMENSE non-difficulty of the game and thanks to an overwhelming abundence of resurrection items, it is never really a danger. Ever. Unless of course one of the resurrection items - which must be reactivated from inventory after every demise no matter how many you have - puts you into a death loop, whereby you spawn back on top of the same thing that killed you -- to die again and restart the adventure from the absolute beginning. Thus is the only real danger in the game.

The different levels that this title might work on are maybe worth a 25% investment. The other 75%... just doesnt work. And with so little time left in beta before release, it is very unlikely that this game becomes interesting by then.

Deer God... I am so sorry. I wanted to like you. :(

So far this game has been enjoyable, but to be honest there are some features (or issues) that have made gameplay irritating, I'll start off with the good bits- the pixal art, the music and the story. The scenery is gorgeous, it's been a long time since I've played a game that put this much thought into a pixel art game. The music and the sound effects are very good, there's been a pretty decent mix of relaxing music and more complex/energetic tunes. And the story has been entertaining, who wouldn't love to play a deer? So far, I have enjoyed the story but with just 2 hours of gameplay I haven't made much progress.

As far as complaints go, mine aren't very harsh. Gameplay with the controller is good - intuitive and fluid. Later, I played with a keyboard and mouse for awhile and the controls were awful (weird key assignments and awkward movements). A menu screen to change key assignments would be very helpful. My other chief complaint is the learning system, there is essentially no guidance for this game at all. Attibutes menus and rules are not explained, I was 40 minutes into the game before I realized you could assign fireballs to the antlers. Just a " press Y to open attributes menu" would have been nice.

Also,the permadeath, I hate it. I'm not hardcore enough for permadeath so the ability to save would be an improvement. I'd rather see permadeath as a hardcore setting instead of the default. But you probably shouldn't listen to me, I'm too old to be a gamer nowadays. I better stop typing and get my fish oil and prune juice for the day.

Absoloutely beautifuly made game, really original storyline-it feels mythical almost... the graphics are amazing for a platformer and i really like the whole 3-d effect with depth of field etc... my only gripe is that it doesnt run very high settings, i would like it to have really high resoloution (2440*1440)

SCORE
GAMEPLAY: 7/10 - not a lot you can really do (controls wise) however its quite neat
GRAPHICS: 9/10 - very unique, however not a very high resoloution
SOUNDTRACK: 6/10 - no music (yet) but still ambient sounds etc
STORYLINE: 8/10 - quite unique

total: 30/40 75/100 - better than half-life 3
value for money: 9/10

comments: it seems to have permadeth :/

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS GAME IS STILL IN DEVELOPEMENT AND IS NOT FINISHED... AS IT IS NOW, ITS STILL VERY NICE