Life of Delta Review

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Well, you probably shouldn’t judge a game by its art style either. And yet, some visuals are hard to resist. Life of Delta is a 2D point-and-click adventure game with wonderful aesthetics, but it falls short when it comes to puzzles and story. Although some might find the presentation good enough to carry this brief and easy adventure, most should consider looking elsewhere for their point-and-click fix.

Life of Delta is set in a post-apocalyptic future where Humans are extinct and sentient bipedal lizards have dominion over robots. You play as Delta, a short-statured service robot who is about to be decommissioned in a pool of acid. But another robot, Joe, pulls Delta from the toxic liquid and begins repairs. This act of mercy gets Joe in trouble, and he is taken by the lizard-people to a military base on the other side of a Megacity. To repay Joe for his help, you will cross the desert, traverse the city, and enter the military base to rescue him. This will mean solving puzzles and helping other robots, and occasionally dealing with the not-so-friendly lizards.

After the intro, the story is anemic for the game’s 3 hour runtime. When Delta crosses paths with other robots, they usually only chat about the problem at hand. The lizard-people are typically cops or guards, so they either arrest Delta on the spot or otherwise abuse him as a robot slave. Given the setting, additional background lore would have made this adventure more interesting.

It does have all the standard point-and-click adventure mechanics. You navigate across screens and either pick-up items or interact with objects. There is an inventory to combine items or just store them for later. Items can be dragged and dropped onto the world, although interestingly there is no visual indication whether you are dropping them on an interactive point, so it might take a few tries. Some minor pixel hunting is required, but screens are not packed with points of interest. Interaction is a bit clunky, with delays after puzzle dialogue and when clicking on things. Even moving Delta with the mouse can take a few attempts to get to the desired location.

The adventure puzzles are extremely basic because there are not many items or interactive points. It requires no thought to work out what goes where. And once an item has fulfilled its usefulness, it is automatically deleted. This streamlines the adventure to extremes. Solutions come far quicker when there are no red-herring items. Even items that travel across screens have obvious destinations. In one puzzle, you give a lizard guard a cigarette and light it, after giving a cow a laxative, to create a methane explosion, and there are no extra items or interactive spots to make this troublesome.

With usually only one conceivable way to solve puzzles, they are not satisfying either. Puzzling is linear, so there are no diversions or funny outcomes. It all unfolds far too predictably. Despite the futuristic setting, solutions are generic. Some are practically medieval, such as when you catch a frog and combine it with a seed to make a potion. Others are common for the genre, like when you use a slingshot to knock down a flag. There are just nowhere near enough fun or original puzzles to solve.

Occasionally you will interact with terminals or machines that create a pop-up screen that looks like one of those old flash puzzle games. These are all visually unique but have similar mechanics. They might involve redirecting a projectile by spinning barriers, melting wires by creating a short circuit, or rotating nodes to transfer power. The variety here is fine but not all of them are intuitive; clicking around typically reveals what needs to be done. These pop-up screens provide the toughest challenge, but even they tend to be fairly easy and forgettable.

Life of Delta’s visual style is by far its best feature. The futuristic setting is part desert wasteland and part cyberpunk city, with the usual trimmings. Although none of the individual pieces are unique, it is put together well. The calming background music also helps to sell the world, mixing soft desert tunes with Asian instruments, like the koto, to create a nice blend. The background art is high quality and all the robots look good. The lizard characters are a mix between dinosaurs and those pigs from Duke Nukem 3D, which is strangely cool. All characters speak with garbled voices that make them sound like the aliens in Star Wars, and that is not the only similarity to that universe

While the world sounds and looks good, it is fairly static. The backgrounds remain fixed for most of the journey. Some electro-magnets will move crates or beams, and a few panels can be opened for those flash-style puzzles. But it is hard to shake the feeling that these are just rare foreground objects sitting in front of inert backdrops. If the puzzles were not so basic, or if there was more interactive points, maybe the nice-looking environments would not seem so distant.

Apart from its cool visual design, Life of Delta is a mediocre point-and-click adventure game. It starts off on the wrong foot, with clunky movement and interaction. Without much story, it is hard to stay interested. Extremely basic solutions to shallow, linear puzzles mean not much thought is required. And only the flash-style puzzles offer a modicum of challenge, and yet they can be rather boring too. Despite its low price, Life of Delta needed more than a pretty veneer to make it worth playing.