So, what would you do if you had a dream where some biblically accurate angel tells you that the world will end in 3 days? Will you try to understand what the heck is going on and try to stop it? Accelerate it? Pack your bag and leave? Surrender yourself to the inevitable? Or just… Sleep through it? This is the scenario that is presented to you in Deadeus, a homebrew Gameboy game that can be played on official hardware, if you have the knowledge and means to do so. What is it with three days? I have seen this time limit come up a few times in other games, the obvious being Majora’s Mask, Dead Rising has a three-day time limit if I recall. For some reason I have it in my head it is more ubiquitous, but I am drawing blanks.
Digression out of the way, Deadeus is a clever little game, in its design, actions do have consequences, which sounds like a marketing snippet that would be plastered on posters and ultimately you are only presented with a couple of choices. But I can at least say that some things that are seemingly minor can impact how certain NPCs talk to you and the endings you will have access to. I suppose this is the advantage of a 3-day time limit, it makes the event management and variables much easier to handle and allows for much more rapid discovery of the additional endings. A couple of the endings do require you to understand the consequences of certain actions to manipulate the location of some NPCs.
Each day you have a dream, with foreboding messaging, as your initial hook into the general intrigue of the game, it is down to you how you go about the days. Besides the initial conversation with your Mum to visit your neighbour, who then encourages you to research the subject at the library there is little in terms of direction, which is fine, it puts on the onus on you on how you want to spend the next three days. The day will not change until you go to bed, so whilst there is a time limit for the overall game, there is no pressure on a day-by-day basis to get things done. You can take your time, explore the entire town and check the nooks and crannies. My only criticism of the game is that it only has one save file, but it isn’t a huge issue, as each day takes as long as you want it to, and if you are going for certain endings, you can streamline your pathing towards it, if it is one that is particularly involved.
There is a lot of intrigue in this game, so many things seem to be going on. During my playthrough of this, which I recorded for my Annual Indie Spoop marathon, I felt like that there are very few lines of dialogue which are superfluous. Most dialogue is either cleverly hinting or explaining something or foreshadowing something. From the weird things your Mother says, to the growing despair and panic from some of the other children in the town, it all draws you in and is just a fantastic experience.
It can be quite easy, especially with modern game development and the tools available, that a project or game can become big just because we have the capabilities to make it so. Large world maps, where some craft is put into set pieces but with pockets of very little going on. We can add lots of tiny little details, we might accidentally make it a challenge for the player to try to find everything, hide things that only the most astute and determined players will find. Add layers of implication and subtext and subtle clues to the deeper complexities of characters. But sometimes, it is a good thing to take a step back and put some limits on your creativity, and I think Deadeus is a great example of this, the ROM file itself is approximately 1MB and in this space, it tells a gripping and big story with a charming amount of brevity.
I encourage people to check this one out, either watching a Let’s Play or downloading it from Itch.io yourself.
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