Life of Delta (Nintendo Switch) – The test

In the jungle of point & click, it is not always easy to find your place… But here is a little robot trying to win our attention by sharing his life with us. The beginning of a beautiful story…? Take a tube of rust remover, we are going to take a trip into the future…

Live my life as a maintenance robot

Life of Delta is the debut of Slovak studio Airo Games. Composed of artists, designers and composers based in England, Slovakia and Vietnam, the studio members also present themselves as video game enthusiasts, but also science fiction and storytelling.

These two themes are also at the heart of their first game. Indeed, Life of Delta is a point-and-click adventure in a post-apocalyptic world. A Great War has wiped humans off the face of the Earth. Today, all that remains are dilapidated maintenance robots and humanoid lizards born from nuclear fallout. Our story follows Delta, a small maintenance robot. As he is about to be thrown into the trash in a vat of chemicals, he is saved and repaired by another robot… Unfortunately, shortly after, his savior is arrested by the militia and our little Delta therefore sets out to find him and save him! So here he is on a quest to explore a vast post-apocalyptic world, in search of his missing friend/surrogate father.

Delta's Omega

As we said above, Life of Delta is a point & click featuring a small robot. The adventure begins very quickly in Joe's house (our savior), but our little Delta is in bad shape and before leaving, he needs to recharge his batteries. There is no real tutorial to guide us, we quickly understand that we have to direct our character like in a classic point & click, except that the mouse is replaced by the use of the left Joy-Con and there… it's the drama! Indeed, we quickly notice that the game has been transposed from the PC version to the Switch version, without taking into account a big effort to adapt to the capabilities of the Nintendo console. Indeed, forget the touch screen, it is not used! But we say to ourselves “no problem”, after all, other games of the same genre do not use touch but still allow you to move easily. Second disappointment, here it is not the case, you will have to click by positioning the pointer with the joy-con towards the place you want to reach, but be careful, clicking in one direction will not be enough, you will have to click on the ground! Otherwise the character will not move forward…

Well, we haven't let go of the controller yet, we notice that the L and R keys allow you to make quick selections of clickable areas (but only in a small perimeter around the character), disadvantage (because you necessarily need one), this has the effect of recentering the cursor on the character. It will therefore be necessary to move it again (with all the imprecision of the Joy-Con) to go to the desired location. Willingly or not, we continue our adventure by analyzing the clickable objects in the environment to interact with them and very quickly, we pick up objects that seem useful to us for the rest like this magnetic card which must certainly unlock the backup battery to be opened with a magnetic card! Problem, when we click on the gear (while we have the magnetic card in our inventory, yes yes, because we saw it appear furtively in a window at the top left), it then seemed impossible to use it… So it was after a good 10 minutes of going back and forth in a table that we finally realized that we had to move the pointer all the way to the top left to make the inventory appear and click on an object to use. A manipulation, certainly, intuitive in mouse mode, but which, it must be admitted, is not as much with a joy-con. And at that moment, the absence of a tutorial seemed quite annoying to us.

In the end, once we had mastered the “basics”, we continued our exploration. Aside from the relatively obvious seek and find phases (a piece of fabric floats attached to a thread, a robot nearby has the means to make a slingshot, but will only give it to you in exchange for something else. Luckily, you have in your belly (yes, because you are a robot, with a chest of a belly), there is a bird that you don't need… except to exchange it to progress. In general, all the elements to use to progress will be in the same table and the sequence to do will be easy. Finally, up to the mini-games!

Indeed, in addition to the research phases, you will sometimes have to use logic to progress in the adventure and obtain new objects, which are mandatory for your progression. However, the absence of clear tutorials will make the approach to these mini-games a little complicated. Indeed, without explanations, you will have to experiment to understand what to do, but sometimes it is not really obvious (such as for obtaining the yellow potion), for others, it is the handling and imprecision of the stick that will put your nerves to the test when you have to demonstrate precision and speed.

Delta forces?

The story, all in all quite classic – the search for a friend in an unknown world – takes place in a rather cool universe. Indeed, the artistic direction mixing robots and post-apocalyptic world is rather successful. The colors tending a little towards rust highlight even more this side of a world in decline. The graphics are successful as well as the animations. The characters that we meet are all different (even if they correspond to the archetypes of the genre).

From a sound point of view, it works. The atmosphere is there and the discussions between robots based on metallic sounds are an illusion. It could almost be a flawless production point of view, because the whole thing is very clean and in addition the game is entirely translated into French (texts only). However, you have noted the “almost”… And yes, despite the beautiful visual and sound efforts, the game suffers from bugs that will force you to reload a game! Indeed, we found ourselves blocked on several occasions, because an element of a puzzle had “moved out” of the play area and purely and simply prevented us from completing the resolution of a puzzle, essential to progress. Fortunately, it is possible to save as much as you want and at any time. In addition, the game offers a welcome automatic save (at least for us, because otherwise we would not have had the heart to start the game again from the beginning, given the handling hazards mentioned above). So note that if you want to progress in the game, you will have to think about saving frequently!

Life of Delta is available is available on theeShop at a price of twenty euros.