Deer & Boy (PS5) Review

Gameplay

Graphics

Audio

Narrative

Summary: If you’re not welling up by the end, I don't know what to tell you.

4

I’m not crying you are

Deer & Boy is a beautiful cinematic puzzle platformer about the healing power of friendship that’s bound to tug at your heartstrings.

The game opens with a boy in a bobble hat sneaking out of his bedroom and running away from home. After making his way across town, sneaking through a building site, and learning the basics of the game, our young protagonist hops on a bus and makes his way into the wilderness, where he befriends a young fawn whose mother is killed by hunters.

Together, they run away from their grief, and the boy’s father, who is desperately looking for his son.

As Deer & Boy progresses and both the boy and fawn grow, the gameplay evolves along with them, from a fairly simple but effective 2.5D side-scrolling stealth puzzle platformer action that sees the boy hiding behind pieces of the environment to avoid detection from construction workers and cops to the boy carrying the deer in his rucksack and using him as a weight to eventually the pair working together to manipulate the environment as the boy directs the deer to pull levers and push switches, to help the boy find a route across Deer & Boy’s beautifully light environments.

Traversal is not always left to right. Oftentimes, there are light scuff marks on climbable edges that allow the boy to move in and out of the environment. However, it’s not always clear what parts of the environment can be climbed on.

In fact, there were several points where it wasn’t clear how to progress, and the solution can seem obscure because it feels counterintuitive to how the game has taught you to act.

This came to a head during a scene in which the boy enters a room with no clear path forward, and the deer is inside a duct running along the ceiling. After several minutes of trying to find an exit, I became frustrated and started pressing all the buttons. Eventually, I tapped the call-the-deer button repeatedly, and the fawn smashed through the duct, creating a new route out of the room. There was no indication this was the solution at all, and at no point previously had calling the deer ever been the solution to a puzzle. (It wasn’t throughout the rest of the game either.)

These frustrations are balanced out somewhat by fantastic set pieces, which include the boy and deer trying to avoid a roided-out boar that’s gone all Mononoke after drowning in a weird substance.

A desperate race to save the deer after it falls into the machinery at a food processing plant, and a phenomenal section towards the end of Deer & Boy, that turns the gameplay on its head, reminded me of Max Payne, and that I really don’t want to ruin it. (Though I feel like I’ve already said too much)

Let’s just say the story takes a turn and a half in the final third and leave it at that.

The winding narrative is buoyed along by delightful art direction. It uses that solid use of colour for the models that Unity does so well. The deer and boy are both incredibly expressive, despite never uttering a word, and the deer in particular is absolutely adorable and superbly animated throughout.

Although there’s no dialogue, the incredibly rich and varied score by Corentin Brasart does an incredible job of ratcheting up the emotion and helping to whisk you along on this poignant and intimate adventure with a mix of cheerful orchestral pieces and oppressive soundscapes that allow the tone of the game to turn seemingly on a dime at times.

Final Thoughts

Deer & Boy is a heart-warming cinematic platformer about the healing power of friendship.

Though some of its more obtuse design choices do knock the pacing at times, it’s still a charming adventure that will have you chuckling and welling up in equal measure.