DEEEER Simulator: Your Average Everyday Deer Game (Xbox Series X)
Random, wacky humor can be amusing, but like any form of comedy, if you want it to be effective, you need to put some effort into it. A joke has both a set up and a punchline after all, so for games that are going for non sequiturs and silly surreality, it’s often a sense of normalcy that needs to be established so that you can then make people laugh with the unexpected subversion of expectations. DEEEER Simulator: Your Average Everyday Deer Game, also known more simply as DEEEER Simulator, isn’t all that interested in putting in the time to work up to its humor though, instead plopping down too many of it goofy sights almost from the get-go and thus harming the impact of each of them.
DEEEER Simulator does get off to a bit of a good start though because its first bit of humor does have some work put into its set-up, but after you take control of the deer you’ll be playing as, you’re thrown into a rough but colorful city with too many ridiculous sights to really laugh at any of them. A giant cow standing out in the ocean, an elephant flapping its ears to fly around like Dumbo, an enormous koala clinging to a skyscraper’s side, it all seems too empty of context for any of it to land beyond that initial impression that you have entered a weird world. It provides a level of surface level silliness and any one of these ideas could have been fun to see if there was some interesting interaction leading up to their reveal, but DEEEER Simulator isn’t too interested in making its odd sights have more substance than that initial impression of something that doesn’t belong has been placed there without too much thought or purpose.
Most of the time in DEEEER Simulator you will be controlling a deer, but the creature doesn’t behave in normal ways. It can prance about, but you’ll probably want to run, which positions your deer in a humanoid stance that stretches it model and makes it sprint at high speeds. You can fight with your hooves, but if you want to actually hurt something you’ll need to replace your antlers with firearms or pick-up a katana or lightsaber while bipedal. Firing the weapons you attach to your deer does seem like it would have the potential for an interesting combat system, but the opposition is unfortunately not up to snuff or will dodge the bullets with ease so you’re not allowed to utilize your tools too much. The police will be your most common enemy, each one of them some silly mix between an animal and law enforcement officer and depending on how much chaos you cause around town more dangerous police creatures will come to try and put you down, but most of them can be effectively fought by firing your firearms while backing away at a measured pace. When the game wants to provide an actual challenge though, the awkward movement of your deer will make avoiding attacks feel too loose as you leap around the boss arena wildly and whittling down the opposition feels like it takes too long.
Combat isn’t the only thing to do while wandering around as a deer though. There’s a handful of basic activities to engage with, things like dancing with citizens or recruiting them as allies who don’t do much besides follow behind you and make token attempts at backing you up in a battle. Your neck can extend out like a grappling hook but swinging around in such a manner is difficult to control and there aren’t really interesting places to go unless there’s already a better way to reach them. Like most things, the neck extending ability is likely meant to play into the oddity of the game and controls poorly as a joke, the rough edges played off as an intentional part of the charm even though the mechanic could have been a satisfying means of exploring the small play area if more effort was put into it. You can pop into cars but they drive poorly, and while crashing into things is amusing for a moment, the short-lived pleasures of DEEEER Simulator don’t have enough substance to make a thrill last long, the player immediately trying to find something new to do but not offered the best of options. It would actually be quite easy for someone to tell you everything odd of note while just trying to describe the game, the game’s trailers even giving away possibly too much so that the mild sense of discovery is harmed by just trying to see what DEEEER Simulator even offers.
A pair of puzzle games are included, one just being a cow-themed version of the board game othello that doesn’t seem to really change its rules, but the game where a 3D model of an animal is shuffled around like a Rubik’s Cube at least provides a unique challenge even if its offerings are lean since DEEEER Simulator doesn’t want to linger even on potentially compelling ideas. There is at least a bit of a story to work through once you’ve exhausted the rather slim offerings for making your own entertainment, and that introduction of a bit of a structure does do the game some favors. A few achievements in the pause menu already encourage you to try and engage with the wacky objects strewn about the world even though the interactions are often shallow, but once you access the city of the future you can start working towards an actual finale. The finale begins to actually make some proper jokes despite there being no spoken dialogue, and while there is some interpretative legwork to be done to get a few of them, the game does actually begin to work on presenting its absurdity in more focused and impactful ways. Being able to focus in on an idea means DEEEER Simulator is able to actually flesh it out rather than hoping the mere sight of something silly is enough to sustain you, and while unfortunately it doesn’t spend long enough in this style of play to really bring the game around to something more entertaining, there is a good deal more thought put into both how it plays and how humor is lead into near the end that makes for moments more memorable than just being shown that some of the cops are polar bears fused with police cars.
THE VERDICT: DEEEER Simulator is full of shallow yet silly ideas that are meant to register as wacky but don’t really have the interactive element required to make their presence truly amusing. When the game does take your hand and whip up a little structure for the ridiculousness it is about to present it can actually construct some humorous moments, but the free form city exploration places too many empty jokes around the space that aren’t entertaining to engage with, partly because the intentionally rough mechanics just end up a poor way to play. Some of its surreal concepts probably will land with a player, but there’s too little to do since there’s little effort involved in the comedy on offer.
And so, I give DEEEER Simulator: Your Average Everyday Deer Game for Xbox Series X…
A BAD rating. It’s hard not to compare DEEEER Simulator to a game like Frog Fractions or Goat Simulator, but both of those games put in the work to establish a base line that you disrupt with new wacky activities and there’s a sense of discovery since you need to put in some work to uncover the oddness. DEEEER Simulator comes on too strong by throwing out a bunch of ideas at once and not really having much to back them up beyond that initial impression. Creating enough chaos to cause a new surge of police critters will probably involve the rather banal breaking down of buildings and cars that you’ll need to repeat over and over again and then fighting whatever creature they concocted for the new wave of danger won’t really be much more involved than the last case, but when the game does whip out something like a boss battle or story scene it suddenly shows it can be a bit creative when it’s willing to actually guide the play. The free roaming exploration only has skin deep wackiness, a lot of the activities you can do on your own too basic or rubbing poorly against the bad controls for your deer or technical problems like detection issues that were left in because glitches and physics going awry can sometimes be funny. Again, such issues are often amusing when an otherwise enjoyable game suddenly experiences a disruption to its normalcy, but here it all feels like things were thrown around to see what sticks without putting much care into individual ideas. There isn’t enough oomph to the surprises to justify the often simplistic action you engage in, but the fact the game can put together a decent finale that unites some more interactive and interesting play with an escalation in ridiculousness shows there was room for some humorous fun within the game’s concept.
The disconnected nature of the ideas on offer isn’t really dadaist or compelling surreal, DEEEER Simulator eschewing purpose for much of its imagery in favor of hoping a buffet of insanity makes up for how little each individual concept provides. Your options for causing chaos are too simple to make exploring really entertaining and few things you find have much of a progression beyond being odd when you first see them, but its light-hearted atmosphere and the occasional successes do mean it’s not agonizing to spend a short time with the game. It seems more like it was constructed for things like Youtubers playing it and exaggerating their responses to the wacky ideas on sight, and funnily enough I even found a video that better edited some of the odd ideas in the game for a more gradual lead up to the insanity instead of throwing it all in your face too quickly, but there the entertainment is still more contingent on the person playing the game. DEEEER Simulator: You Average Everyday Deer Game needed to offer more itself, not in terms of quantity so much as trying to make sure if it is telling a joke there is some lead-in so you can properly absorb it and laugh along with it. When everything is attempting to invoke randomness, the impact of each new concept is weakened, the new normal becoming the abnormal and the silliness not able to shine due to the crowded company it keeps.