Demetrios - The BIG Cynical Adventure

After several years in the wilderness, it now feels like I am starting to make some headway into clearing out the sizeable backlog of games that’s built up. Just taking one game at a time seems to be working and games like Demetrios provide some light relief from the smashing my head into a brick wall that is Outlast.

Demetrios follows the story of Bjorn Thonen, an antique/junk dealer living in Paris. He is mysteriously robbed one night when someone breaks in to his flat and steals a tablet and all of his money. He then goes on a quest, or adventure, to get his stuff back and find out what’s going on.

Now the first thing to note about the game is the title. ‘Cynical’ implies exactly what the game is like. Bjorn is a fucking twat for the most part. I don’t think I’ve ever been put in the shoes of a more unlikeable protagonist and that’s an opinion shared by most of the supporting cast, despite there being a supposed love interest, who also, quite clearly, doesn’t like him.

The other aspect of the game I didn’t like was the toilet humour. There is an option as the beginning of the game to dial it down but you need the maximum amount of toilet humour to unlock all the achievements and I wasn’t going to do two playthroughs just to see what it was like without it. I don’t find fart jokes or human faeces funny in any way so to see a character get needlessly covered in vomit or wet themselves is just unnecessary and not to my tastes.

I’ve not been left in complete hatred of the game though. Despite the dependence on toilet humour for cheap laughs, there are quite a lot of fourth-wall breaking moments that were quite clever and also funny. My personal favourite is part where you are in the police station and you can get arrested by using the photocopier. You can then come back and pee on a plant which results in another arrest but the policeman remembers your previous indiscretion when he’s not supposed to. This causes Bjorn to say, ‘What?! You’re not supposed to remember that!’ These little bits of humour almost make the game worth playing.

At its core, Demetrios is a point and click adventure game with some puzzle aspects thrown in. You can pick up a wide variety of items, all of which will serve some purpose at some point during the story and some even have more than one use. I found the controls a bit clunky and it doesn’t look very nice – again, this is personal opinion; the cartoon feel didn’t appeal to me in the slightest. Also, along the lines of aesthetics, the music did my head in, in places. It just had that stupid toilet humour sound to it and one specific part of the sound track appears to have someone do a sharp exhale that sounds so stupid and yet somehow has got stuck in my head and annoyed me for the past week.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 36 Achievements

Of the 36 achievements, six of them are earned through completing the six chapters of the main story. The rest are situational where you have to perform a certain action at a certain time. Annoyingly, most of these are secret and don’t protect any part of the game’s story but are most likely made secret to create further annoyance.

There are a lot of collectibles throughout the game too, the two most notable being the cookies and the game overs. In every scene you go to, there are three hidden cookies you must find. Some of these are ridiculously hidden and I couldn’t even see them on the screen some of the time. The other set is for dying in every conceivable way and this is really the main achievement in the game, despite being worth zero points. Thankfully you don’t need to get all of these on one playthough and you can use chapter select to go back and get any you missed. The game is kind enough to let you know which chapters you have missed deaths in as well.

Despite having chapter select, there is one missable achievement. You need to turn on the tap in Bjorn’s flat before leaving Paris causing his flat to flood when he returns. Something so small which is quite easy to miss.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Demetrios is a straightforward completion with a guide but it’s long winded for what it is and collecting all the game overs is an episode in frustration, especially considering it offers zero points. I didn’t find any of the toilet humour funny and it’s definitely for specific tastes. It took me under ten hours to complete, so middle of the road in terms of speed.