Super Daryl Deluxe

This is the story of an underdog. Silent and unassuming, easy to miss. But in truth a super deluxe potential lies within, waiting only to be unleashed! This is the story of this game.
It took me a bit to get into the groove of the game, but once I got past the first few levels, it really clicked and things opened up. The combat was surprisingly rich with many moves to custom tailor your playstyle, I think it's the first time I played a game with a beat em up type combat and yet feels like a metroidvania (more on the vania side).
The map was really good, showing you all you need from one, and with essential locating upgrades to reduce pointless pixel hunting late game. There's a fair amount of side quests being "beat x enemies" but I think it fits for the RPG beat em up gameplay to remove any need for regular grinding. I think my main annoyance with the game is that the text speed is quite slow, and the dialogue button can't be remapped and is not the regular interact button.
I love absurdist games that take seriously an unserious world, it had many moments that had me laugh or smile. The whole vibe overall with gameplay and comedy is very feel good with some nostalgia. The art style and animations are extremely competent and contribute to the whole perfectly with how goofy they can look. The same can be said of the sounds and music, I love that most of the tracks have voices that sing Daryl's name.
The story goes places, yet can manage to take you off guard with a comedic twist but never at the detriment of the game's credibility. How the Valedictorian is incredibly useless and did less to hinder you than the weakest Honor Student. Or how you never actually manage to defeat the Science Honor Student regularly.
Despite some growing pains, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this game. It was not lost through History, he answered the call.

A perfect, beautiful game. Buy it. Metroidvania build-a-brawler or whatever you want to call it.

this is amazing game, I started it years ago but was struggling during the introduction, just try to get through it and then it WILL get really great

Fantastic Napoleon Dynamite-esqeue side-scroller. While the ending might put some off, it's definitely worth picking up on sale. The writing is suberb.

I picked this up during the last Steam sale for about 3 bucks and at that price I'd highly recommend it. Super Daryl Deluxe is an odd one. More of a beat em up than a Metroidvania or perhaps more accurately an RPGvania as the store page describes. It's a wacky adventure that truly shines when you're exploring this bizarre world that the devs created. The writing for this game is brilliant in that it never takes itself seriously and there were a lot of laugh out loud moments. A light spoiler, but one of the highlights for me is a section of the game where you rescue Ebenezer Scrooge from the ghost of Christmas past. This is turn prevents him from learning any lessons and instead vowing to spend the rest of his life eradicating ghosts and trust me there's an amazing payoff for this later in the game.
The game itself is a bit repetitive but fun. The combat reminded me of The World Ends With You. Daryl can equip 4 abilities, and later 8, to different buttons. Each one has different effects and cooldowns so you rotate through them quickly. There's a nice variety to them too. Unfortunately this is where my main criticism comes in. I find there's just too much of it. This game has a lot of side quests and they all boil down to killing a ton of enemies or collecting things they drop. It can become quite monotonous. There's one particular stretch through a massive pyramid dungeon that just never seemed to end. Also because there are no autosaves you can lose a bit of progress if you die before finding a save point. The other major problem for me is that this game does have some issues with crashing. My game crashed 4 times during my 20 hour playthrough, but the worst was right at the start it crashed when I was saving my game. This wiped my save file and since the game has no autosave, I had to start the game over. If this had happened later on I'd have dropped it completely. Unfortunately I don't think this game did well and I don't think we'll be seeing any patches to address these issues. I'd recommend saving to a different slot every time you do just in case, although it only happened that one time.
Aside from those issues I do recommend Super Daryl Deluxe. When you're engaging with the world and the characters it's a 10/10 for me. There's so many great jokes, great set ups with side quests and payoffs for the long running ones. The world itself is bizarrely fascinating. Whenever the gameplay got tiresome I pressed on to see what would happen next. I do hope that we may see a sequel or just another game from the team behind Daryl. It's a fun game that I'd love to see improved upon in a future entry. For 3.99 I can look past the flaws and I say you should definitely give it a try.

Unique art style, engaging gameplay, and quirky storyline.
I consider it a fun and enjoyable experience, expecially for RPG fans.

Probably the most underrated game on Steam. It's a shame this game never caught on. it's excecllent.