Daardoa

Genre: First-Person Horror / Misc.

Players: 1

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Review:

Daardoa, released on PC in 2021 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2022, is a First-Person Horror game and… I don’t really know what, beyond that. The game has you wandering around a forest with some vague instruction to “find the ancients and bring them home”, without really explaining what the ancients are, what they look like, and what is “home”

Playing the game, you’ll wander through a bizarre, foggy, alien-looking forest full of trees with no leaves and blue trunks, enclosed within a fence. Occasionally you’ll see malevolent creatures in the fox and have to run from them. In some places you’ll find odd structures, half-encased in a blue crystal growth. At one point, I found a creature inside and… is this one of those ancients? No, it’s attacking me, I guess not.

The game’s sound design keeps things creepy and ominous, but more than that, I was just confused, not knowing what to do or where to go. Early on, the game hands you a strange object you’re supposed to be able to “hold up to reveal paths”, but when I press the designated button, nothing happens.

Oh, and also, this game won’t let you play with a Pro controller for some reason. Joy-Cons only. Boo.

I don’t know, probably there’s more to this game that I’m missing, but I don’t see it as my fault that Daardoa fails to reveal it to me. I found this game to be nonsensical, pointless, and I cannot recommend it to anyone.

tl;dr – Daardoa is a First-Person Horror game set in a strange, alien-looking world of fog and bare blue trees, where you must evade malevolent creatures hunting you while trying to “find the ancients and return them home”, whatever that means. This entire game is an inscrutable mess, and I cannot recommend anyone to play it.

Grade: F

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