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Explore A Glitched World In Deios II: Deida's Demo

A beautiful glitched world

Bosh on your headphones, scooch closer to your screen, and don't mind the bland puzzles: the free demo for Deios II: Deidia [Itch page] is a wonderful thing to put into your ears and eyes. Deidia is a broken game, masquerading as the salvaged and cobbled-together scraps of a game corrupted and thought lost on '90s BBSs. It skips illogically between scenes, glitches out, and clashes with its emulator, and that's all very fun. But goodness me, it's not half a looker! I'm a sucker for mountains and caverns with waterfalls, trickling streams, and crashing waves. Have a look/listen:

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Deidia's a sequel to the 2014 original Deios, about which our Adam observed "Sometimes a game is so startling in appearance that I don't want to know how it plays lest the illusion of something new be shattered." And yeah, I can see why he'd say that. Maybe it's true for Deida too.

The movement has an unpleasant fingerfeel. The puzzles are mostly exercises in rotating switches the correct amount to move blocks into convenient place, though the trailer does hint at more interesting stuff I haven't seen yet because I paused on a fiddly switch 'em up. Doesn't mean I haven't had a wonderful time filling my head with Deidia.

Watch the trailer, look at animated GIFs, then - if you've an inability to focus on and enjoy specific parts of a game - simply keep Deidia in your imagination. That'd be an awful shame, though. Whatever I lost by finding out what how it played (like a wonky puzzle-platformer) was more than made up for by the experience.

You can download the Deios II: Deidia demo from Itch. It's having a crack at Steam Greenlight too, aiming for a full release this year some time from July to the end of September.

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