Demetrios: The Big Cynical Adventure is a quirky point and click adventure game by developer COWCAT. A more humorous attempt at the point and click adventure, the game is meant to hook in fans of games like Broken Sword.
The game centers around Bjorn Thonen, a lazy antique dealer living in Paris, France. After having a long night out at one of the local bars, Bjorn returns home only to get warned that he is in grave danger. Assuming it’s a crank call, he hangs up the phone, and goes to sleep. But moments later someone breaks into his apartment. Awakening to find only his wallet and an antique tablet missing, Bjorn launches a full scale investigation into the whereabouts of the missing items.
Demetrios offers players classic point and click adventure gameplay, with a bit of puzzle sprinkled in from time to time. The game is pretty straight forward, with an explanation as to what you need to do next contained in the dialogue from Bjorn and other players. If you happen to forget what you’re doing, you can open up the top game menu, where you’d manually save, and you’ll see what you need to do next.
There are 3 cookies hidden on each screen in Demetrios. Collecting cookies satisfies the completionist in you, as well as the opportunity to get hints, should you need them. By eating some of the cookies you’ve collected, the game will steer you in the right direction.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not that great at puzzle games, and occasionally when I was stuck the game would only give me 1 hint. This was a little frustrating at times, but encourages the player to solve the problem themselves rather than eating a ton of cookies. When you happen to kill Bjorn, the game doesn’t reprimand you. It cuts to a screen with his coffin, tells you how he died, and then asks you to continue. Collecting deaths is part of the game, and you can see how many you’ve collected from each chapter in menu.
Demetrios’s gameplay is designed for those that like point and click games. That may be an obvious statement, but if you aren’t into point and click adventure games, and some basic puzzles, this game isn’t something that’ll interest you.
The music found within Demetrios can only fit one label: cute. This isn’t cute in a bad way, on the contrary the game’s original soundtrack is quite refreshing compared to the normally dark gaming soundtracks we find in recent times. Rather than trying to jerk an emotional reaction from the gamer, Demetrios allows you to become fully immersed in the comedy mindset.
I wasn’t the biggest fan of the art style when I first started playing the game, but within half an hour it grew on me. After coming to understand that this was not your typical game, whether Indie or AAA, I appreciated the art and music much more than I did at the beginning. All that being said, at times the art didn’t really fit the situation at all. Rather than having the action portrayed in the cut scenes that are reminicisent to comic panels, the action would be put it in brackets in the characters text. This made the writing feel clunky, and not to the quality that you’d expect from a story driven game.
Demetrios’s gameplay drags in very few spots,with the first playthrough taking 5 hours. The website claims 8-12 hours of gameplay, but doesn’t state whether that includes replays or not. The game can be replayed for different reasons, including collecting remaining deaths, renaming characters, and getting the missing cookies.
Demetrios isn’t innovate in it’s genre, and it’s attempt at comedy can be considered childish at best. There were only a few moments that made me genuinely laugh throughout my time with the game, and I don’t think the title could get more then a smile on a second time around. Instead, Demetrios can pride itself as a solid entry into the point and click adventure genre and will encapture the hearts of dedicated fans. It isn’t a bad game, it just fails to hit that mark of greatness.