Deedlee Doo! Carkour! - A (Purposefully) Frustrating Experience, Perfect for Steam Deck

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Have you ever wondered about how to make a game like Getting Over It or Chained Together more frustrating? You throw a car, coupled with some Rocket League-like physics, into the mix. And hey presto! Deedlee Doo! Carkour! is born!

Deedlee Doo! Carkour! - Gameplay Impressions

Without a doubt, Deedlee Doo! Carkour! captures the frustrating gameplay of similar "climbing simulators". In fact, almost everything about the game is designed to induce rage and frustration.

The ground is uneven, meaning that to control the car properly, you'll need to be in the air and rely on momentum, you have pretty good control of the car when in the car, able to rotate and pitch the car as you please, and also gain limited momentum by throttling and braking with thrusters, but to gain any real speed, you need to pass near a surface and use boosters to push yourself away from it.

The physics generally works fine, and if you do fail, you can usually attribute the blame to yourself. Which will happen, as there are a lot of variables to consider while in the air, such as your cars angle to the wall you aim to boost yourself off of in order to progress, you might need to wall jump for example, by angling your car slightly and boosting off a wall, before rotating your car the other direction and boosting off the adjacent wall, gaining a little height each time, but this requires perfect angles.

The game's sound also adds to the frustration. The music is a fairly repetitive loop, and to be honest, you might want to disable it. The sound effects for the car are ok, but each time you fail, a clip will play of a child laughing at you, chastising you, or otherwise making fun of your skills, and there are only a few clips of audio that play, so that can also become repetitive and annoying. The developer has stated that the music will be reworked for the final release, however, as well as more voice clips being added to the mix.

If you're on a particularly hard part of the game where you are resetting every few seconds, it can get annoying pretty quickly, and unfortunately, the voices are tied in with the car sounds on a volume slider, so you can't have one and not the other.

Visually, the game is made up of real-life clay figures, the ground is uneven lumps of clay, all the objects and platforms are clay, even the car you're driving is made from clay. It's pretty cool and unique, and does give the game a certain style.

If you do like these kinds of games, you'll probably enjoy Deedlee Doo! Carkour!, just be prepared for what kind of game it is before you dive in.

Deedlee Doo! Carkour! - Steam Deck Performance Tested

Deedlee Doo! Carkour! recommends you play with a controller, so that's perfect for us Steam Deck users. The game also supports 1280x800 as a resolution, so we can avoid black borders around the screen.

As for performance, the game offers several presets, and I found the "Medium" preset to be the best. It runs at around 75-90 FPS, but if you limit it to 60 FPS using the in-game limiter, you can save some battery life and still get a perfectly stable and smooth experience.

You're losing some graphical quality, as I believe Lumen is disabled at this level, but you really want a smooth and high framerate for this kind of game.

Power draw was around 14W-16W on the Medium Preset, and you can expect a good 3.5 hours of battery life on an OLED, or 2.5 hours on an LCD, if you can play that long without throwing your Steam Deck out the window.

Final Thoughts

Deedlee Doo! Carkour! achieves what it sets out to do, a mostly competent, yet frustrating experience. The physics does the job, most of the time, the visual style is interesting, the sound design was a mixture of irritating and frustrating when I played, although that will hopefully improve as it's on the developer's to-do list for the launch on May 12th. The game will be priced at $2.99, so it's a very modest price tag for what's likely to be a few hours of content.

The game does run great on the Steam Deck, however, so you can't fault it on that front.

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