A Slog Through an Otherwise Interesting Idea

We’ve discussed Daria in the past. The five season (plus two movie) TV series is a timeless classic that also manages to feel specifically of a time and place in our pop culture world. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the disaffected youth style that seemed so natural at the end of the 1990s and into the early 2000s, but it also taps into what everyone growing up feels, regardless of the decade you were born or who you were in the pecking order of high school. It works so well that even now, 23 years later, it’s still a beloved go to for so many people, young and older.

While the show was a solid enough hit for MTV back in the day, prompting a number of marathons of the series and, for some, surpassing its parent show, Beavis and Butthead, in the echelon of TV comedies, it didn’t have much in the way of merchandise to go along with it. Now, sure, one could say that Daria herself wouldn’t want to see much in the way of merchandise bearing her name, but MTV was part of a corporate family, and corporations hate to let good products go without monetizing the crap out of them.

There were a couple of books, a bit of journaling software, and just one true video game, Daria’s Inferno. Considering this is likely the first time you’ve heard of this game, that should say all you need to know about its quality. Hell, I’d consider myself one of the bigger fans of the series and I only accidentally stumbled on the existence of this game while I was looking up what was going on with the Daria and Jodie series that was supposed to be coming out (which evolved into a Jodie movie and, as of the time of this writing, has been all but cancelled entirely). And yet it does exist, and I suffered through it so that you don’t have to.

The setup for the game is simple enough. While sitting through Mr. O’Neil’s literature class, as he drones on about Dante’s Inferno, the class is startled by the entrance of Ms. Angela Li. The principal is upset because five very important items – a pencil, a hall pass, the library’s copy of Winnie the Pooh, her Disciplinarian Award, and the school mascot’s head – have all gone missing. Until those five items are returned, the whole school will be in detention every day. No exceptions.

After she leaves, Mr. O’Neil goes back to droning on, putting the whole class to sleep, Daria included. She passes out, only to wake up in her room… except she realizes it’s not really her room. From the painting in her room emerges her friend Jane, who informs Daria that she has to go to five locations around town – the school, the mall, downtown, her own house, and Mrs. Li’s Labyrinth – to find the missing items and return them to the school. Only then does she get to escape her own journey through personal hell.

The game is set up like a basic point-and-click adventure. Daria moves around the various stages, following wherever you click the mouse. She can pick up and use items you find, with those items frequently being needed to stop hazards or open pathways so that Daria can move deeper into a specific area. Each stage, of the five, will have its own set of items and things to use, with their own puzzles to solve. The number of items isn’t very big, and most puzzles can be solved with just a little bit of thought, making for a fairly relaxed adventure experience.

Now I do say that most puzzles can be solved in this way. Sometimes, though, the game follows adventure game logic and expects you to put a weird one-and-one together to make some unknown combination. Even in the first area, there’s a security guard minding a conveyor belt and to distract her you have to give her a lifeguard floaty. She then runs off to stop kids from swimming in a pool, but you’d be hard pressed to know that was the solution without clicking all the items in your inventory on her until something works. It’s not intelligent and it doesn’t make sense, but at the same time there are so few items in the area that just randomly clicking everything you have doesn’t take very long.

The high school is the first area, and it’s the smallest, but it also shows many of the problems you’ll run into as you progress through the game. The game isn’t just simplistic in approach, it’s also slow to play. Daria walks at a sedate pace, without any way to speed her up. Meanwhile the levels are huge, which mostly comes down to empty space. You have to walk everywhere, but most of the time there’s nothing to do but scour the area for one, maybe two items you’ll need, most of which get used immediately somewhere else in the expansive areas. It all speaks of padding and wasted time.

Worse, because the game is segmented into five areas, there’s no continuity for the plotting. Hell, there’s no plotting at all. In a game like King’s Quest, where you similarly have to collect three items so you can prove your worth and end the game, but the items and story are all connected across the various zones and parts of the world. There are little threads everywhere, and while most of the game is small chunks that don’t have much to do with one another, the whole overworld full of tiny connections leads to a sense of a cohesive world. Daria’s Inferno lacks that, and it’s weaker for it.

Still, if there’s anything that does work about the game it’s that it looks and sounds like Daria. The animation and drawing style is clearly modeled on the original show, and all the voice actors returned to play their characters. I wouldn’t even be surprised if a couple of the writers from the show came on to write the dialogue for the characters just to get them sounding like themselves. It feels like it came from the world of the show, just without the tight pacing and quick storytelling you’d expect.

I honestly don’t know how you’d fix a game like this without completely changing everything about it. I suppose if it was modeled more on a King’s Quest game, with a more tightly set world, with faster travel and more items, that would help. Keep things focused, make more connections between zones, give the characters more to do. There’s a thread of something interesting here, but it would take a lot of work to get it to a point where it feels fresh and fun. This game is a slow, plodding mess that doesn’t make proper use of its world. It’s a low-brain adventure without any fun, and for a title based on Daria, you’d really hope for better.