‘Deity’ Review – Darkness Reigns

One of the challenges of creating a game is to establish effective pacing. The difficulty of balancing tension and subsequent release, challenge and gratification, highs and lows, is in making sure that they cycle at a steady, if occasionally unpredictable, pace. If one were to take a traditional stealth game such as, say, Assassin’s Creed and speed up the sawtooth cycle of stealth-tension to kill-release, then one would get Deity.

Produced by a team christened Double++ at the Digipen Institute of Technology, Deity is a stealth/action game with an aggressive pace. As a dark spirit whose nation was overrun by crusaders and angels, you possess your way across the halls and corridors of castles and other medieval buildings in order to reclaim your home. Your core ability to accomplish this is the power to leap from object to object, devouring any enemies you come in contact with. “Slaying enemies just by jumping on them?” you ask, “wouldn’t that be easier than lying down with a weighted vest on?”

Well, yes, at first impression it seems fairly tame, before you realize that leaping on enemies from the front damages you, while doing so from behind doesn’t. Also limiting your progress is the fact that if you are detected, enemy knights can bombard you with light, your primary weakness, whether you are inside a torch or corporeal. All in all, from these simple mechanics comes a considerable variety of challenge. With a constant stream of enemies and torches to shoot yourself through, movement is your most important asset, since you can only attack while moving. If you can stay unseen, it’s possible to pick off soldiers one by one, leaving the others to wonder unsurprisedly how their friends vanished into the ether. One is reminded of the Batman: Arkham Blank games and their sneaky-stealth awesomeness if played on fast-forward.

The aforementioned rollercoaster ride that is springing from light to flesh to light to gargoyle to flesh to light is a fast and thrilling one for a stealth-focused game. As a shakeup of typical stealth mechanics, it works admirably. As effective pacing it works fairly well also, since the entire Deity experience can easily be finished in under an hour, or half of one if you’re a gaming veteran – the rollercoaster analogy applies equally well when talking about length. Given its abrupt and satisfying conclusion, Deity simultaneously leaves us with a lingering thirst for more and the fading satiation of having appreciated a fresh gameplay style, however briefly.

When discussing games born of student effort, it’s important to realize that the game is trying to fulfill two purposes. It must function as an engaging game, and it must convince players that the work done on it was qualified and repeatable. As such, Deity performs both tasks well. The development team specifically decided to make their game from a custom engine and also to make it short and sweet with the possibility of future additions down the line, but that doesn’t at all mean that what is here is insubstantial. Deity is wonderful for a quick jaunt through an original concept, at the most appreciable price point. Don’t be surprised if the members of Double++ soon appear on longer credit rolls.

Find out more about the game at its official website. You can also follow the developers on Twitter.

Review summary Pros:

Short and sweet

Cons:

A little too short

Rating: 81%