This Week In Retro: Oh, Deer! (Patreon)

June 17, 2015: Initial Deer

by Diamond Feit

Video games featuring automobiles have endured for over half a century at this point. Not only is it easier to recreate a motor vehicle on screen than a realistic human body, we all fundamentally understand how cars look and move at a glance. I didn't get my license until my senior year of high school but even at age 5 I grasped the basics of Pole Position: Turn wheel to steer, press pedal to move.

Racing games have qualified as a genre unto themselves since before my birth, especially if you include the early cabinets with physical moving parts instead of a monitor. In an era when every game needed to communicate the essentials instantly to reap the most coins, presenting players with a high concept action like "driving a car" puts your machine at an immediate advantage.

Despite my intense fascination with video games I found myself avoiding titles centered around operating cars, trucks, or bikes and I don't exactly know why. If I had to guess, I suspect I lacked an interest in the realism of the genre—much in the same way I dislike sports video games despite enjoying sports. When a racing game got my attention, it did so by introducing weapons or other far-fetched elements to divorce the action from the real-life act of driving.

That said, I know how indie developers love to iterate on classic concepts to deliver a new experience, so when a small team presents a game with a car's bumper in the middle of the screen, I don't write it off without trying it for myself. If said game comes out for an underappreciated handheld console and costs mere pennies, all the better. Hence why, 10 years ago this week, I purchased Oh, Deer! for my PlayStation Vita and immediately started drifting.

Oh, Deer! has a bare-bones premise, putting you behind the wheel of a station wagon and urging you towards Grandma's house. You steer with the left analog stick and accelerate/brake by pushing the right stick up or down. The on-screen display shows the vehicle's speedometer and fuel gauge, the latter of which depletes steadily as you hit the gas. Periodic checkpoints automatically refuel the car—there's no need to pull over at a pump—but if your tank runs dry, the game ends.

The main thoroughfare of Oh, Deer! is a three-lane highway that stretches from an urban center to the quiet neighborhood of Oakdale where Grandma resides. The journey takes many turns but never forks, so each session sends you through the same exotic series of environments including jungles, deserts, and rows of Moai statues.

Based on my description thus far, Oh, Deer! sounds like a dead ringer for OutRun, the 1986 Sega arcade game about driving a sports car across a vaguely European network of expressways. Yet Oh, Deer! removes all traffic from its roads, so players don't need to dodge any other vehicles. Since you have no competition en route to Grandma's, the official Oh, Deer! press release emphasizes that it is "not a racing game!" but a driving game.

In fact, the only obstacles standing between players and Oakdale are hundreds of deer lined up on the asphalt. They stand perfectly still—often grouped together in a single lane—and explode upon impact. Ramming deer does not damage the station wagon or slow your progress, but it does mess with the music and the game keeps track of every animal you hit or miss.

I think Oh, Deer! prefers that players not kill wildlife en masse, but the odd warping sounds and the cartoonish blood splatter add some dark humor to the gameplay. Nevertheless, a message at the top of the credits roll warns that over one million American drivers collide with deer every year, encouraging us to take more precautions because "[our animal buddies] were here first."

Having laid out my rationale for not enjoying driving games, what possessed me to purchase Oh, Deer!, let alone dedicate an entire column to its 10th anniversary? I'm certainly not an OutRun fan; my playthrough of Yakuza 0 came to a sudden end when the story demanded I get a high score in Sega's celebrated arcade classic when I could barely reach the first checkpoint.

For me, the appeal of Oh, Deer! lies entirely in its presentation. The game makes excellent use of colorful scaling sprites to give the drive to Grandma's all the excitement of an Olympic bobsled ride. I find it a challenge to fully appreciate all the stuff you drive past considering how much concentration I need to keep my station wagon on the road, but the graphics really pop on my launch Vita's OLED screen.

Oh, Deer!'s soundtrack also goes above and beyond the call of duty here thanks to the efforts of Motohiro Kawashima, best known for his collaborations with Yuzo Koshiro—the official press release specifically highlights Streets of Rage 3. Kawashima composed an astonishing 17 tracks of music for a game that lasts at most seven minutes per session. Again, I'm not good enough at driving games to even last that long, but I bought the complete album on Bandcamp years ago and routinely enjoy its many chirps, beeps, and blorps.

If my opinions thus far have you itching to head for Grandma's house yourself, I have good and bad news. Oh, Deer! originally came out as part of Sony's short-lived PlayStation Mobile initiative which shut down in July 2015, making this game one of the last—if not the last—releases. If you bought it you can still play it today but if you didn't, it's unavailable for purchase. A second version surfaced in a 2017 Humble Monthly Bundle but that, too, has since been delisted.

However, Necrosoft Games has revealed that Oh, Deer! will make a comeback as a minigame included in their upcoming (as of this writing) title Demonschool. That game has nothing to do with driving or deer but I'm glad more people will finally gain access to this oddball simulacrum of a road trip. Consider this my endorsement of Demonschool: Come for the giallo-inspired aesthetics and tactical combat, stay for the unlimited drifting to electronic dance music.

Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but xer work and opinions exist across the internet.