Super Daryl Deluxe

I went into Super Daryl Deluxe expecting a throwaway indie brawler with a quirky coat of paint. What I got was closer to 25 hours of the most confidently strange action-RPG I've sat with in years, built by exactly two people, and still talked about warmly by anyone who actually found it. That matters, because this one almost guarantees it slips past your radar. The core loop is an RPGvania, meaning Metroidvania structure with RPG leveling bolted on and brawler combat doing the heavy lifting in between. Water Falls High School is a sprawling interconnected map where each classroom collapses into its own surreal dimension. The history room drops you into battles alongside Napoleon Bonaparte and Julius Caesar. The science lab has you scrapping with rogue beakers. The art and music wing pulls in Mozart. It sounds like random chaos, and the game knows exactly what it is: the writing leans into the absurdity with real commitment and earns genuine laughs rather than just winking at the camera. Daryl himself is a silent, gangly, social outcast whose complete passivity makes the increasingly unhinged world around him funnier by contrast. Combat is cooldown-based. You equip up to four skills at a time, each mapped to a face button, and chain them to burn down enemies. There are over 40 skills to unlock, spanning melee, ranged, status effects, and weirder utility options. Textbooks are the in-game currency for buying new abilities; lunch money from kills and locker ransacking funds equipment and light crafting. Two separate XP tracks run simultaneously: standard XP grows Daryl's health and gear access, while skill-specific XP upgrades individual abilities. The skill variety is genuinely good. The upgrade depth inside each skill is less impressive - you are mostly just improving damage output, and reviewers have noted there was room for more meaningful customisation there. Boss fights do break the pattern usefully, requiring more strategic thinking than the standard corridor-clearing. The friction points are real and worth knowing before you commit. Quest objectives can be vague to the point of frustration, and at least a few send you wandering without signposting clearly that you cannot complete them yet. The pacing has some rough level-gating that can push you into light grinding even with side quests kept up. The save system puts save points in bathrooms with no autosave, which means a bad death in a long dungeon can cost noticeable progress. None of this kills the experience, but players who hate unclear objectives or lack of checkpoints will feel it. The local co-op mode is present on PC as a bonus if you want to drag someone into the weirdness with you. The hand-drawn art style is the other reason this game sticks. It looks like a bored kid's notebook given a full animation budget: exaggerated faces, strong black-and-white contrast, and environments that shift tone completely between zones. The soundtrack holds up well for the majority of the runtime, though long dungeon loops can wear on you. This is emphatically a single-player experience built for people who like to poke at RPG systems, read optional journal entries, and appreciate writing that actually tries to be funny rather than just referential.

Fred · Scout Team

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