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Oh Deer!

By: Omar (@siegarettes)

• Oh Deer!
  
• Developer- Necrosoft
  
• Publisher- Necrosoft
  
• PlayStation Vita (PS Mobile)
  

Playstation Mobile is about to be put to rest, but not before one final shout before its end. Oh Deer! is both thorough homage and recontextualization,  something that repurposes the aesthetics and vibrations of the original game for a cheap and absurd shock. That is, it’s an Outrun style driving game where you drive a station wagon through lines of deer on your way to grandma’s house.

Oh Deer! is a game with deep respect for SEGA titles. Watching it in motion immediately communicates its history with SEGA’s Outrun, while Necrosoft has brought back composer Motohiro Kawashima, one of the men behind the soundtracks for the Streets of Rage series, particularly Streets of Rage 3. Necrosoft is working so close to the cloth that SEGA made that it’s impossible to talk about Oh Deer! without looking at how it relates to Outrun and that history.

Here Kawashima’s soundtrack provides a sinister set of melodies that stands in violation of the breezy atmosphere and sense of escape that’s been the defining component of Outrun. Going between the two games makes its clear what they’re about: Outrun asks a mastery of the roads you travel in exchange for new locales and sights, Oh Deer! asks the same to move you with methodical, sustained violence.

The emptying fuel gauge and speedometer needle pressure you to keep moving. Horizons blur into and out of pixelated fog. Crashes and empty fuel tanks scratch at the image like a bad television signal. Landscapes are rendered in stark high-resolution detail, with hundreds of sprites changing the airy, abstracted transitions of Outrun into a surrealist dream path. Cities give way to pillars of parted sea, jungles, with palaces and pyramids looming on the horizon.

Oh Deer! is a game that’s born of fond memories of Outrun arcade machines filtered through Midwest anxieties of driving through dark roads, fantasies of worldwide escapism. Sinister, beautiful, and asking for expansion.

It’s also .50 cents and might not be around for long. So go ahead. Take the trip.