Video Game Review: Angelo and Deemon: One Hell of a Quest

Angelo and Deemon: One Hell of a Quest

Publisher: SpecialBit

Genre: Adventure, Point and Click, Puzzle

Platform: Nintendo Switch

Angelo and Deemon is a point and click adventure game with a fun premise – vlogger Angelo is mistakenly taken to Hell by a Reaper, makes an alliance with a rapping demon called… Deemon, and must work out how to escape and return back to his real life. Despite his unexpected trip to Hell, Angelo is determined to make the best of of the situation and decides to document his experiences there, reasoning that it’s going to make him go viral once he get back. You play as the nonchalant youtuber and guide him through the various realms of Hell, solving puzzles along the way.

The game itself has gorgeous artwork, in a fun comic book style clearly inspired by old LucasArts games – it’s definitely one of the strongest elements of the game which has a fairly quick runtime of about three hours. Made by indie Ukranian studio, SpeacialBit, it boasts full voice acting throughout and a colourful and zany sense of humour. This definitely comes across as more of a comedy game then anything else, with a heavy reliance on pop culture references including Back to the Future and Stephen King’s It, to name just  a few. It’s indie roots are obvious and the team have clearly put a lot of love into their third game release. Ultimately, I found this game to be a bit of a mixed bag however. Whilst I could see what the developers were trying to do and I’m sure it will definitely appeal to some people, I wasn’t enamoured with the end result. The game looks gorgeous and the voice acting is surprisingly solid (even though, I personally really disliked Angelo’s voice which I found very irritating), with some cool ideas on show. It’s execution however ends up falling short of it’s lofty aims.

Angelo himself is our wisecracking hero but I didn’t really like him very much – he was just there to make jokes and ultimately I found him rather shallow and annoying. The other characters fare much better but it’s the game mechanics and the puzzles which left me feeling frustrated. The game is just… so very slow. Point and click is never a hugely fast method of gameplay but the fact Angelo would walk around at snail pace made the pacing painful very fast. Whilst you do unlock a method of transport partway through the game that can speed up travel, this doesn’t unlock travel to every area in the game’s world and often you end up having to go back and forth from one end of the map to the other just to complete one aspect of a puzzle which sapped a lot of the enjoyment out of the experience.

The humour for me ultimately fell more into cringe-worthy territory then being genuinely funny and the game makes a lot of effort to be self aware of what it’s doing. The puzzles are often surprisingly tricky at times though sometimes you’re left with so little clues you’re left just throwing various things at one another in the hopes that something works. There’s little in the way of a tutorial and it wasn’t until halfway through the game that I realised you could click on the microphone of your phone in the item menu to talk to an Alexa like computer on your phone who could give you hints as to how to achieve your next objective. The game ends rather abruptly with the hint of a sequel in the works, but if I’m being honest I doubt I’d want to go on another quest with Angelo and Deemon again in the future. Ultimately, I found this to be a game which tried a little too hard and fell short of what it was trying to go for – still there are glimmers of brilliance scattered throughout with the gorgeous artwork and zany characters and it’s a shame that the execution fell flat.