Deiland

 

Deiland

Type	Adventure sandbox RPG
Single or multiplayer	Singleplayer
Developer	Chibig
Publisher	101XP
Fun	3/5
Difficulty	3/5

 

Deiland is a game where you take care of a planet. It sounds like a monumental task, but the execution of it is simplified and not nearly as daunting as it may sound in the beginning. After all, this tiny planet can be walked around in less than a minute.

From a technical point of view, it is obvious that the game was intended for younger gamers. The characters and their surroundings, the NPCs and buildings, everything has a cartoony, slightly exaggerated look to it which is, admittedly, very pretty. The sound part only covers the atmospheric background music and effects, such as a spaceship landing or the sheep bleating. The characters all talk in text only, which is understandable since this is not a AAA game.

The camera movement is smooth and follows the main character. There is also a special point of view where you can see and move the entire planet, for example to avoid a meteor hitting your crops. This part shows you the whole world, and is quite neat, from a graphic perspective.

Referring to the sandbox in the type of the game, Deiland lets you plant crops, bushes, and trees, build items and tools, cook and brew, and trade with all of these. It may sound complicated, but in reality it boils down to a routine of plant-water-wait or mine-collect-build, which comes dangerously close to tedium. The trading with other characters that land on your planet, or characters on other planets you visit, makes it more bearable, but not by much.

The game also boasts a fighting system. However, don’t expect a full-on RPG battle system with blocks, dodges, and counterattacks. It’s a very simple system consisting of attacking a monster when it’s in range or using a few very rudimentary spells. Nothing min blowing, but again, enough to claw away from the boredom that seems to haunt it at every step.

As far as the story goes, you are a young prince, waking up on a small planet. You have to make it your cozy home, by building farms and wells, and planting trees and vegetables. You are limited to only three plots of arable land, but you can plant an entire forest full of oaks and blueberries on the rest of the planet. 

Your planet will also be visited by other characters, merchants, pirates, anda aliens, who will all have a decent amount of quests for you. None of these are hard, but they can get a little frustrating. Here’s an example: you have to go to the ice planet to finish a quest. You get there, and the NPC asks for a pizza. You don’t have the ingredients, so you have to go back to Deiland, where you have to wait for wheat to come to term. By the time you harvest it, the spaceship to the ice planet has gone. You summon it again, only to realize that you have no more fuel, and you need to craft that now, and so on and on.

The reference to the Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince ends within the first five minutes of the game. It gives way to a confusing mix of epic and science fiction, which at no point will keep you at the edge of your seat. It’s just there to give some sort of cohesion to the story.

Deiland would have worked perfectly fine if it were only a planet creating simulator. It was fun to watch the forests develop and the crops grow when rain comes, but the whole game never enchanted me. Some of the hundred or so quests were interesting, but most were just repetitive button mashing and grinding. And while rotating the planet and finding a place for an interplanetary chef to land and share his recipes was fun, it was overshadowed by more than 250 pieces of stone that I had to mine to get enough steel for a new tool.

Overall, I can only recommend this game if you really have nothing better to play and want to kill a few hours. On the other hand, if you know someone aged 8 to 12, this would be a great game for them to develop critical thinking and the understanding of cause-effect relations. So let them play Deiland, and be a young prince who grows crops and forests and solves quests on his tiny little planet.